I wish this nostalgic myth would die. Back in the Win 9x days we all had laughably slow spinning disks and hardly any RAM. Interfaces for simple programs like Minesweeper and Notepad were instant, sure. But anything heavy like Word, IE, Encarta, Visual Studio, etc. were definitely not.
Most of those kinds of apps are way faster now than they were in the 90s, mostly thanks to SSDs. (Visual Studio is a notable exception - they really screwed it up after 6.0.)
And my main rig is a Dell T7920 running Win11 Pro for Workstations 24h2, with a Gen4 TLC NVMe directly attached to the Gen3 PCIe bus (at 7,000/6,900Mbps it can totally saturate its channel), 256Gb of 3200Mhz DDR4 LRDIMMs (4×32Gb), and dual 8C/16T Intel Silver 4110 CPUs.
By any measure, my current rig should have blown the Win2k machine out of the water. The Win2k machine did the file operations in HALF THE F**KING TIME
I strongly disagree.
- 486 Packard Bell that I upgraded ram from 4MB -> 12MB as a kid? Win 3.1 went from being slow period to Windows 95 being fast any time I didn't touch disk or CD-ROM.
- ZSNES on Pentium MMX? Zero lag gameplay with time-travel debugging and full memory view.
- DOS running on a Pentium 4 to support legacy software? Nearly instant everything, especially power on -> usable machine.
You'll notice a common thread. It was possible to outrun the demons of sluggishness back then.
when it comes to responding to user input - while memory is being swapped, yes.
in contrast, even when the computer wasn't responding, it never lost keystrokes. I'd type ahead and then the characters would appear when it was ready.
now, the windows computer just randomly loses characters and loses focus for no reason. if it's not paying attention when you're typing or clicking, it just won't respond.
At any given point, old applications are faster and current applications are slow, slowness being unevenly distributed: if you can pay extra for bigger memory and CPU, you get to use the fast lane.
Also consider that companies balance a number of factors: costs for themselves, time to market, features, what the competition offers. New, more powerful hardware is an opportunity for them to make sloppy software cheaper and first to launch.
Some calculation intensive parts sure are thanks to modern CPU with plenty of cache and RAM and multiple cores.
GUI on the other hand are often atrocious