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My first computer had a 33MHz CPU and 16MB of RAM, and I believe the disk spun at a paltry 4200rpm. My pipe out to the Internet was provided via a 56k modem, attached to the serial port.

This machine had a physical power switch. You could not put it to sleep, so it required a cold boot every time. At boot, it would run a _very slow_ self test of all 16MB of memory, after which it would spend another minute loading drivers under DOS before spending another minute booting Windows.

If you wanted to go online, you spent another minute waiting for the modem to dial out, and 10-15sec for a well-optimized page to load in Netscape. In many cases, like wanting to look up information on some subject, it was faster to put the Encarta CD in the drive, wait for it to spin up and for the program to launch, and search from that.

If you wanted to do _both at the same time_, you could do that! But be prepared for the machine to become slow as molasses as it swapped out to that 4200rpm drive.

Fast forward to today. My laptop is in standby 80% of the time. It's usually reconnected to Wi-Fi before I can enter my password, and I can look up an article on Wikipedia in under 15 seconds of having picked the laptop up.

I disagree wholeheartedly that computing has become slower. I can achieve the same results in a fraction of the time it used to take.

Jesus Christ, Encarta, now there’s something which was deeply nested in the cache of my mind

I share your observations on the evolution of specs and of user experience. But I disagree with the conclusion. My observation is that the more powerful experience today is not proportional to the compute, memory and storage resources we are deploying.

Looking at the bigger picture, just having a lot of OSS nowadays having apps hiding in the background rather than being killed; constant updates and pinging of servers by apps; etc means that we now have a much bigger, bloated footprint.

Modern computers have more bandwidth and more latency. They are faster and also feel slower.

http://danluu.com/input-lag/

A computer is a sophisticated machine. Of course you are going to be able to point to here or there where it is true that input lag is worse or whatever, but the general concept that "older was faster" is wrong.

I am fully aware that my MacBook Pro is overall faster at compiling code than my Commodore 64 was ever capable of. I am also aware that getting a keystroke from a polled USB keyboard up through the many layers and context switches to get it to a screen takes more time than it took a much older system.

Those results show no clear correlation with age at all. It that low latency was possible in the 80s and it's still possible now. But throughout computer history there have been plenty of terrible high latency devices.

I agree with OP. Generally computers today are much faster than they were in the 90s.

Indeed. As I pointed out, they are faster at compiling code and slower at processing keystrokes.

Sure computers are faster today, but I think the point is that with all of this available horsepower that we have gotten quite lazy about having performant software. These GUI apps really only feel slightly faster than they did 20 years ago, but you'd think given the orders of magnitude more computing performance, the time it takes to do things like open applications, files, save, etc, would also progress at such a pace. Clearly there are inefficiencies when it takes over 10 seconds to open microsoft word on a blazingly powerful M1 cpu. using the cli on an m1, sure, everything follows as expected with lightning quick tooling at that level, but its in the gui software, the software most people use day to day, that the inefficiencies are exposed.

This isn't my experience. I just went to a Computer museum and they had a TRS-80 from the 1980s. The keyboard latency was incredibly low, and text editing (typing programs in Basic) felt a lot more responsive than using Google Docs, Microsoft Word 365 or a modern IDE.

A lot of things used to be slow, but they involved doing a lot of math or loading data from external storage. The computer "staples" of simple spreadsheets, text editing, using a calculator etc had a faster user experience than today's computers.

But you are actually right that software "did less". The thing is that most applications don't need to "do a lot". What a lot of users need from computers changed little, but we added a ridiculous amount of overhead to it.

There was stuff that was always slow, stuff that involved processing a whole lot of data. Like building, or archiving, or generating reports etc. People wanted faster computers for that. UI was not slow, text editing was not slow, networking was not slow (WWW was, of course, because loading GIFs on dialup took time, but telnet connections into a box with less compute and less memory than my home router has nowadays were snappy). User interaction used to be real-time, non-interactive data-crunching tasks were really slow.

Reduce your screen resolution to 640x480 and most software will feel a whole lot snappier, I bet. Pushing all those extra pixels to a 4k monitor adds a lot of overhead.

Not at all, I went from 1080p to 4k and back, and there is no effect:

teams still takes the same amount of time to load.

It takes me 25 minutes to scroll back 3 years in large chat in what’s app desktop client

It takes me like 2 minutes to scroll back same amount in telegram desktop client

Not if GPU accelerated. If software rendered(or bad GPU), then yes, you should see a big difference.

Probably because old software (e.g. emacs) feels a lot faster than new software (e.g. vscode) on the same hardware, that and nostalgia

Honestly vscode is quite snappy and I often seem to run into issues with Emacs performance.

For a long time printing a largeish string to a buffer would crash Emacs, and it still lags vscode in opening large files in my experience.

That's true, I remember starting applications and running to grab a snack from the fridge while they loaded. It was not unusual to have to be careful while using certain applications to not overwhelm them with work or they'd run out of memory and crash or freeze. I recall reading a discussion specifically on this point, suggesting ways that software should elegantly handle user input to avoid this problem instead of blaming the user for being too aggressive.

They were slow, yet now they should be fast theoretically, not in practice though.

Anecdote Alert: I remember using winamp in the olden days and everything about it was instant, no hint of lag. Then it died. Then it was resurrected and is as laggy as everything else is these days.