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Comment by eurekin | Hacker News Reader

It feels now like an alternative timeline, one which performance optimisations were first and foremost still. Sometimes I fantasize, thinking how would our current development ecosystem look like, if we never abandoned the "be very vigilant with all resources you use" approach, that includes the whole webdev liftoff, where we ship a few hundred mb chromium engine for a dock app

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We'd have far fewer apps, far fewer features, far more bugs, far more crashes, far less stability and far more memory safety vulnerabilities. Oh, and Linux and Mac would be far less usable.

The age of performance optimizations was the age of computers as little islands that didn't need to communicate with anybody or anything, and definitely not outside of a homogeneous LAN environment. It was the age of people having just one device, running one OS, with no expectation of data synchronization. Sharing files was, at best, done by sending quarterly_report_v14_approved_by_legal_fixed.doc over email. This is no longer the age we live in.

That's still how many users end up sharing files.

In the timeline I remember, Microsoft and Windows were routinely criticized for producing bloated and buggy systems. Especially from those who previously used an Amiga or Mac. A new version of Windows inevitably meant buying a whole new computer, along with upgrading the memory midway through it's 3-4 year lifespan.

A friend of mine installed MS-Windows 95 on a 386 and Weird Al Yankovic nailed it:

But my machine, it's obsolete. It takes an hour just to bring up the screen!

https://youtu.be/Obt4rI7Dhbo

That's a throwback.

Weird Al didn't make that song! That was Bob Rivers.

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