For many people, Win 95 was paired with 486s with 8 MB RAM or early underpowered Pentiums with hardly any more. Opening the start menu would sometimes take seconds, like the computer had to ponder for a while. Applications frequently had to sit in waiting as the spinning rust slowly volunteered some data.
Things are much better now.
It still does take several seconds to open start menu, same for calculator. Explorer takes sometimes a minute so I have a different file manager open constantly.
The trick is to combine windows with any type of DLP enterprise software. It consistently delivers this horrible experience.
But aside from poor enterprise setups, try opening win11 start menu on a computer that has internet, just veeery slow. Suddenly you will miss those times of win95 loading start menu icons one by one, with a soundtrack of scrubbing HDD.
I don't miss those times purely because of huge stability differences. 20 years ago or so, systems crashed all the time and filesystems had to be repaired constantly. I even clearly recall how often was a kernel panic on random Linux distro, when you tried early docker.
It's frankly ridiculous how everything "kinda seems to work" but not really
>yet computers don't feel much faster
it depends on the computer rather. The slowest I've experienced was a cheap laptop with Windows Vista where just right clicking on an icon to see the menu could take like 30 seconds. I'm now on an M1 macbook air where everything is pretty much instant. That said the other instant computer I had was a Psion 3 which came out 33 years ago so it's down to the individual design I guess. Windows has always been kind of bad to varying degrees.
I can still run a Debian 12 with KDE on a standard SSD way faster than a Win 11 installation on a NVMe, and that installation is 8 years old, and runs tons of applications at any given time.
Even just loading files off the old spinning disks took ages. Loading screens for a game could take 5-10 minutes.
Even just booting into my Linux box took 3-5 minutes and optimizing the boot time was a whole thing you spent a lot of time on.
I remember the day I received my first SSD and installed it in my computer, it was like Christmas morning. Things are way faster now.
My Macbook goes off when I shut the lid and right back on when I open it up. Try doing that on my early 90's Toshiba Satellite.
We live in a magical world now of high speed, multi-core and NVMe hardware. I have no desire to ever go back.
It's instantaneous compared to the 90s and even the 2000s. It wasn't until 2010-2012 that I remember switching to SSD, which is when I feel the turning point was.
I still have it, and when I put an 32bit version of Debian on it a couple years ago, it was molasses. Somehow I used it for years with no complaints.
Even the first Mac Portable[1] had fast sleep/wake. As did the Radio Shack Model 100[2] from the early 1980s. Early Apple laptops could spin down the hard drive (vs. modern Macs where you can't easily shut off I/O-intensive background daemons like mdworker, syspolicyd, photoanalysisd, etc.; fortunately SSDs mitigate the issue somewhat.)
Like literally, I have a Pentium MMX 200 Mhz (64 MB RAM, 8 GB CF Card) machine right next to my Surface Pro 9 (i5 1235U, 16GB RAM, 2 TB SSD). The Pentium (running Windows 98 SE) demolishes my Surface Pro 9 (running Windows 11) in opening applications, and UI latency. I can literally open about 30 copies of Windows Explorer before Windows 11 opens a single one. Honestly the only thing that's really slower is booting since it takes forever in the BIOS stage.
Modern software is just slow. We've given up all of the advantages of our orders of magnitude faster I/O.
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And significantly less reliable.
Remember how common crashes were? (Including BSoD!)
Like, you can solve 90% of memory crashes by using a memory managed language but that is course has costs.
I see references that mention that installing fonts can significantly impact boot time. Maybe the installed software and devices had a significant impact.
Also hardware input lag definitely isnt better, and many times worse than in past: https://danluu.com/input-lag
The fact of the matter is the hardware has gotten faster and the software has gotten slower, cancelling each other out at best and slowing down at worst.