I'm not sure I understand the premise, because CPU speeds were 20x slower. Just go back a decade or two.
They weren't some halcyon days of bug-free software back then, quite the opposite.
They weren't some halcyon days of bug-free software back then, quite the opposite.
But IRC used to respond instantly. Feels like apps are doing roughly the same thing but more slowly despite having computers that are orders of magnitude faster.
It was always slow on contemporary hardware. On affordable PCs Win 3.1 was so slow you could see it redrawing windows and menus. Win 95 was so resource hungry, people wrote songs about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOwQKWiRJAA). XP seemed fast only at the end of its very long life, due to Longhorn project failing and delaying its famously shitty successor.
It wasn't just Windows. Classic MacOS for most of its life could not drag windows with their contents in real time. Mac OS X was a slideshow before 10.4, and Macs kept frequently beachballing until they got SSDs.
There was shareware you could install which would do it though! Even on a 25 MHz 68030 it was surprisingly usable (more usable than the passive matrix LCD at least) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cQo29SIIgU
It got a bit slower in color on an external display https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peWIysrf7DY