That meant burning CPU cycles just for doing IO.
because hard drives. Now we have SSDs and the desktop is slower than ever still.
Apple adopted the UI conventions, and refined, polished, and extended them to create first the Lisa system and then the Mac. But early Mac OS ("System" in those days) was very much based on a procedural, Pascal-based API without much in the way of object orientation. Your app had to handle the close button and the resize grabber itself, for instance -- actually listen for mouse events, determine if there was a click in the appropriate region, and close the window or buzz in a loop drawing the resize rectangle. Utility functions were provided to help with this process, but it still had to be part of your main loop. Dialog boxes were defined with Pascal records.
Microsoft, by contrast, hired some of the Xerox PARC engineers away -- guys like Charles Simonyi. The design of Windows reflects this, as Windows more closely reflects the Xerox PARC work at an architectural level. It had from the very earliest days something like an object system. A window belonged to a window class, which contained a single method (the window procedure or WndProc), that processed messages from a flexible and extensible message system. Windows could even be "subclassed" by substituting a different window procedure. This more flexible design allowed the system to provide the necessary decorations (minimize and maximize buttons, a system menu, resize grips and even scrollbars) and the client window would receive messages from them to let it know that, for example, it had been resized or scrolled. The actual mechanics of how these decorations worked could be delegated to the system. The API was still in C, not OO like we know it today, and was a bit cumbersome to use -- but it had more of those object-oriented ideas than early Mac did.
Of course, Steve Jobs didn't make the same mistake twice, and for his first post-Mac system, NeXT, he had it based all around object orientation.
The turning point was MS switching to C# for everything. Now built in apps load slow because the code is not JIT compiled yet, and I bet other issues...
A typical XFCE system on startup will allocate around 500MB of RAM, but with the way memory management works on Linux I think it doesn't really need all of that and lets go of it if something else does.
It is kind of a barebones desktop environment, but certainly has a lot more stuff packed in than Win9x did and for a little extra disk space you can cherry pick whatever Gnome and KDE utilities you want anyway.
So I think this phenomenon of slow modern desktops is a Windows/Mac problem, if you want one that's lightning fast, they're out there.
I'll try this for my new NUC, thanks for the tip!
"how fast would Windows 95 be if you ran it on modern hardware"
It is actually just astounding, to the point that you end up feeling "jesus is my hardware really that fast?".
(more or less Ubuntu sans snaps, though their Cinnamon desktop is also reasonably okay, even if not quite as snappy as XFCE)
The big one is desktops that I like, working out of the box: Cinnamon, XFCE or even MATE (can install more, of course, but these ones are supported and tested). XFCE is really snappy and lightweight, whereas Cinnamon is pretty polished and will also be familiar to folks coming from Windows (nice distro to recommend for that, for people with limited Linux experience).
Another big thing is not having snaps forced down my throat like Ubuntu increasingly seems to do. In that regard, Mint is closer to Debian, although if you want to, there is nothing holding you back from using AppImage, Flatpak or anything else (even snaps).
Compatibility that is otherwise pretty close to Ubuntu, as well as a long EOL period: after the demise of CentOS, Ubuntu remains one of those distros that you can just "install and forget about" (hopefully with regular updates), both locally on your workstation and in any of your servers. I can even base my containers on Ubuntu/run it on servers (pretty much every provider has support for it) but use Linux Mint locally and have pretty much everything work.
Now, frankly I could also opt for Debian without too many issues (they also have an LTS variety, albeit less advertised), but Mint is basically Ubuntu without some of the things that annoy me - boring and dependable, mostly just works.
Only annoying thing: if you ever need to setup an apt repo that points to packages that are compatible with Ubuntu and the script for doing that gets the release codename, it might get one that doesn't correspond to the correct Ubuntu release, but instead will grab the Mint name. Sometime need to fix that manually in the apt repository list with a text editor.
Due to that “training” I still hit CTRL-S obsessively even when it hasn’t been needed for years.
I'm mostly in the `:w` camp now, but still...
Same here, but because I used to forget to save before tabbing over to something else that depended on the changes I made. Now I never forget to save...
It certainly wasn't for me! At the time I had my first it job in a local pc repair shop and we had a series of 24h burn in tests. If the newly installed pc crashed during it, there was something wrong with the hw. My personal windows 95 definitely didn't crash more than once every few weeks of heavy use. Programs did crash, explorer did crash, but the actual BSOD was quite rare.
Sounds like you just happened to luck into reliable hardware with well-written drivers.
For me, something about using CorelDraw with my video card led it to crash probably about once every twenty minutes of use.
On the other hand, if I just stuck to working in Word and wasn't trying to simultaneously play MP3's while also downloading files, I'd be fine.
You didn't need heavy use; there was a signed 32 bit integer bug that would cause W95/98 to lock up consistently every 31.5 days or so.
You can load Windows 95 into a VM today and still get the same results every 31.5 days.
[EDIT: 49.7 days]
I did a lot of optimization on my systems. Not drastically hacking crap, just obsessively pruning unnecessary services and software etc. Registry cleanup tools. Etc. Also always had as much RAM as I could afford.
I'm not sure if there was a correlation there but it sure felt like it. Seemed like folks with constant blue screens had PCs filled with crapware. Maybe the difference was purely hardware or, purely luck, I dunno.
You better keep that habit when working in big MS Word files. It still randomly crashes and I've lost some amount of work several times due to this shit.
Same. I psychotically hit cmd-S or :w after every line of text I write; there was one time my computer crashed and I lost my entire 4th grade book report because I didn't save. I didn't know how to touch type then, so it took forever for me to retype it. Never again!
I didn't switch away from 98SE on my home computer until XP SP2 (which I immediately theme to look like 98 because I hated the primary colour nonsense).
Actually, every Windows installation from then until I switched to Linux was "shrunk" and tweaked (can't remember what tool I used, but it wasn't an official MS thing). Having a full licenced copy of InstallShield at work was extremely handy too - every app was repackaged into a fully automatic installer and bundled with the OS. It almost felt like a cloned PC. In fact when I got a job managing fleets of PCs, that XPCD Builder script was like a superpower.
Are you running win10 on a P4? Madman :)
> sure do feel nostalgic how fast and responsive the desktop “felt” back in those days
Wasn’t referring to the retro computing setups of today.
That's not how I remember it. Windows 9x was slow and
constantly crashing.
If you had a did your own clean Windows installs, had an extra $100 of RAM, defragged the HDD regularly, and disabled crapware and unnecessary services etc. the UI felt real sharp and instant.
However this was not the typical experience. Typical experience for most people was that you clicked the Start menu and then listened to the HDD grind away.
I recall using an AMD 5x86@133 with 64mb ram with Win95 then NT4 and it was very usable at the time. It wasn't the best for gaming, my cpu/gpu weren't great, but for general work/productivity use it was pretty great for the time. I had received the wrong ram by mistake, and it worked... was supposed to be 16mb.
edit: I also recall paying extra to add in a cache module on that mb.
Same story at my previous job. Actually, my work laptop had been faster than my personal one for a while because I had gotten a special purchase due to the nature of my work and IT didn't know what to do with it (we contracted IT services out to a 3rd party. We were a small non-tech company). But then someone caught wind and I was made to figure out how to get IT's tracking software installed for them. And that's when I started working from home all the time (a situation I could manage as the non-tech company wanted me to own the code personally. Yes, a little weird, but it was all a tiny sure other for the company).
It's not the tech, it's the bureaucracy.
Haha, I know this. I could be doing absolutely nothing and my 10th Gen work laptop CPU is chugging along at 40% utilization.
I'm on Gnome because I prefer the design, but if you want fast it might be worth a shot.
I tried to run DSL (damn small linux) on my P60 around 2003-4 and felt what you've just described. The UI seemed to respond before the interaction!
Then, a few months ago I spent a an evening or two messing with Microsoft Bob (Win 3.11) then Win 95 trying to code a simple website compatible with the tech of the time, using the tools available at the time. Everything felt so snappy.
I don't mind animations applied thoughtfully (e.g. short UI transitions emphasising the state change), but what annoys me the most is animation jank, drops in frame rate, unpredictable delays. Older Windows versions weren't that great in that regard either (do you remember how much time it used to take for the "Open With" dialog, or event file context menu to show up on Win, when you right clicked on a file in Win9x-7?)
I wish Apple would let me watch each of their oh-so-clever animations one time to give these “designers” their satisfaction, and just jump-cut to the final state from that point on.
That's because you installed a ton of 3rd party shit which were registered as a handler for this/all filetypes so when the Explorer needed to show that menu it had to query every registered handler, extract an icon and if those .dlls weren't in the RAM, then you waited for the slow disk access.