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Comment by reddalo | Hacker News Reader

I think Windows 9x was peak Windows.

Everything is clear, you know what's a button and what's not. Information density is also high, which is a good thing on a computer screen.

But the main thing is that Windows 9x felt responsive. The Windows widgets felt solid and performant, while "modern" UWP apps feel clunky and prone to breakage. And don't even get me started on Electron.

Edit. See OP's previous article here, he managed to capture what I was trying to say in more details, with nice screenshots: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html

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Windows 9x did not feel ‘performant’. This is a false memory people seem to have.

Spinning rust hard drives were slow. It took ages to launch a program - loading screens typically had time to display a progress bar and a series of notes about what they were up to - ‘loading extensions’, ‘reticulating splines’, etc. Word would stall whenever it was autosaving. Carrying out an operation like spell checking or doing a find across a whole document or getting a word count took time.

Remember windows used to have an hourglass cursor? You used to have to watch that thing flip and empty multiple times when doing things like emptying the recycle bin.

Windows 9x was typically not running on a permanently networked computer. The computer wasn’t running a bunch of background network tasks like checking for updates or polling your email - generally it was just being slow because it could barely cope with running more than one program at once.

Thanks for reviving the reality of it. I saw the hourglass icon so many times, that I am able to picture all of its frames in my mind. Windows 9x might have been close to peak UI design (for me I'd say Windows 2000 is the sweet spot, and I always configured "Classic Style" on Windows XP and 7), but 95/98 was not responsive. And that's when it wasn't crashing.

Word 2.0 forever made me distrust Microsoft with an error: "File too large to save."

It was on a 20Mb hard drive, and the file was small enough to fit on a 1.44Mb floppy.

Turns out it was an obscure defect in Word: if you had quick save on, and the last page had a diagram or image, it would choke. Quick save or fast save - I forget what it was called. This would append deltas to your file, I think.

That is true, but the discussion here is about speed, not reliability.

Would you rather have a clock which is stopped or always running fast?

I have a running Windows 98 PC with P3 550MHz and SSD connected via IDE adapter. The drive is a bit out of place, but it’s legitimately the fastest booting, most responsive computer in my house. Its only speed issue is that it can really do just one thing. Any heavy task (including large file/network operations, apparently) will render the system almost unresponsive until it’s finished.

I wonder how the CPU in the SSD controller compares to the one in the PC.

That depends upon the type of SSD. There’s compact flash which is natively IDE, and the controllers are extremely weak, then there are modern TLC SATA drives where the controller would probably be a bit more powerful than the machine’s CPU.

It wasn't out of the ordinary at the time. See C64 floppy drive CPU.

> This is a false memory people seem to have.

I have no idea where that false memory is coming from, I also remember being utterly frustrated by Windows 98 on 450 MHz with 64 MB RAM. The only systems ever which felt performant to me are modern minimalist Linux on modern hardware.

For a long time i had a small Pentium III PC (released in 2000, though the hardware inside wasn't the best you could get at the time as it was meant to be compact instead of performant - it was in an almost pizzabox sized case) running Windows 98 for retro games and software (though mainly games). At some point i installed Visual Studio 6 to it too - and IME it launched instantly[0].

In general everything ran fast... except stuff that had to do a lot of disk access, obviously (i.e. installers and such). But i never though that the system didn't feel responsive.

Also many modern programs have splash screens too. E.g. have you tried to launch Gimp or Krita recently? Or Eclipse? "Heavy" applications never stopped having those.

Of course computers are much faster now, nobody is saying otherwise. What people are saying is that it often doesn't feel so. If my Pentium III can open Visual Studio 6 faster than my 3700X can open Calculator, then yes, things do feel more performant on the Pentium III running Windows 98 even if the modern machine is much faster.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h79Bt7h5ceo

No idea if it's true but I remember that people are still using the Visual Studio 6 IDE because it's so much faster than the latest Visual Studio (though using latest Visual Studio compiler).

Windows 9x achieved performance only a small factor slower than what we've got today on 1000x faster hardware.

VS6 was mentioned in a sibling comment - Casey Muratori's project loading and watch window stories come to mind. He had a video, which I can't find any more, showing him loading an identical project, compiling, starting the debugger, and watching a variable while single-stepping in VS6 on Windows 95 on Windows 95-era hardware, and the same on Windows 10 on Windows 10-era hardware. Guess which one was faster. It wasn't Windows 10.

Yes when we talk about the past there's an element of nostalgia-tinted glasses but there's also an element that stuff is just fucking worse now, and for no good reason. (I blame landlords - think about it. The whole economy is being pushed to do more with less because the value extraction related to land keeps increasing.)

Discord today does not load more quickly than MSN Messenger used to.

Windows itself was snappy and when it was slow it was because the machine itself was slow. This was communicated to the user by the machine making a hell of a racket doing machine things.

Windows was fast because the machine was slow. Now we're in a situation where Windows is slow in spite of running on a machine that outclasses every computer in the world combined 30 years ago.

Put an SSD and a modern emulation behind Windows 98 and it flies. You’re excusing inefficient software because it was paired with improved hardware.

But it didn’t do much? This was an OS where plugging in a USB device required a reboot. Where connecting to the Internet required running winsock. Where most of the software had hard 16bit limits like the max size of file notepad could open being 32k and excel having 65535 rows.

It wasn’t efficient it was limited.

It was an offline OS for an offline era. It ran trusted software (everything it ran was something the user had explicitly installed) so it didn’t need to work to protect the user from malicious code. It wasn’t encrypting everything it wrote tot he hard drive or all its network traffic (if it was even handling network traffic). It didn’t support Unicode or vector typeface rendering and realtime video rendering at more than 300x200 pixels.

Computers are doing so much more nowadays.

> This was an OS where plugging in a USB device required a reboot. Where connecting to the Internet required running winsock. Where most of the software had hard 16bit limits like the max size of file notepad could open being 32k and excel having 65535 rows.

Then just jump ahead to WinXP. It too flies if you put it on an SSD, and has solved all of your problems. It ran fine on a Pentium III (MS's minimum req is a Pentium 233, a Pentium III is more than twice as fast).

Now we have computers that are over 300 times faster than that, but yet we're still stuck baseline stuff like 'how make ui not be slow'.

You can’t just move the goalposts like that. OP claimed win9x was ‘peak windows’. If you concede it wasn’t great but then want to say WinXP was ‘peak windows’ (good luck making that claim stick with anyone who remembers it) you’re making a different claim.

The goalpost to me is 'An OS doesn't need to doesn't feel like shit on reasonable hardware'. Windows 95 does that with flying colours. So does XP. The only reason they ever felt slow was because they were on mechanical drives. If everything you had open was in RAM and you didn't need to swap to disk, they both worked great. Now there are SSDs, so that problem went away, but modern Windows and many common programs managed make that problem come back despite SSDs and modern processor being lightning fast. And it's not like doing that is impossible. There are modern programs that manage to make good use of the hardware.

There's not much I can see that prevents us from having both a UI that doesn't feel like shit and is featureful. Linux isn't too far off in many cases. The whole idea that modern Windows is slow because it's packed with features is one I reject.

This is true but also false.

It’s true that things could be slow on those old machines, especially when it had to hit disk. It’s true that things were often single threaded and would stall.

But what’s also true is that this old code was orders of magnitude more efficient. Put that code on even a modest machine from today with an SSD, even a Raspberry Pi, and it would scream. Everything would be instantaneous.

Some of the reasons for this degradation are unavoidable, like high DPI displays and feature depth, but a lot of it is just bloat on top of bloat on top of bloat.

> It took ages to launch a program - loading screens typically had time to display a progress bar and a series of notes about what they were up to - ‘loading extensions’, ‘reticulating splines’, etc.

Just like today, without the progress bars. And some "apps" even cheating by being preloaded in memory.

By 2000, Windows 98 felt extremely performant. By 1995, Windows 95 was the bloated thing trying to replace Windows 3.11 that would take ages to boot and needed minutes to respond to a click at random.

With those slower drives, programmers tended to be more careful about not wasting those preciously expensive I/O's - they had to put more care into architecture, often resulting in more optimized, efficient code. And since lags were expected, they handled waits more elegantly - hence the hourglasses and such. This immediate feedback even when there was a delay is what made the experience feel more responsive.

Modern apps that ship with browser engines just to show some UI are hugely bloated by comparison.

You also didn't have dozens of different telemetry, update, crash collection etc. services constantly running in the background eating up resources and I/O's. Go into Event Viewer, Services, and Scheduled Tasks on a pre-Win7 era workstation and you see how much less crowded it is.

It's crazy that people keep talking how fast the computers were. They weren't. It's amazing that they could work with so little hardware resource compared to what we have now, but old PCs were not "snappy" in any way.

> Remember windows used to have an hourglass cursor?

God thank you, yes, I actually do think that most have actually forgotten what UI was like back then. Rose tinted glasses are such a weak point for people.

Was reminded of this article when I read what you said: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/06/19/waiting.html

I have an ancient Windows 98 computer which I used to use at my grandparents' home until a few years ago. All the problems you mentioned did exist. However, the machine still felt more responsive than today's laptops. Something being objectively slow is very different from it feeling slow when you use it. As an example, I never had Word autosave turned on. It was always explicit (even if this meant I'd usually lose what I was working on when the computer lost power)

I find this take (from the guy who wrote the Windows task manager while at Microsoft) to be evenhanded.

> Windows "SUCKS": How I'd Fix it by a retired Microsoft Windows engineer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTpA5jt1g60

Nah, that goes to either Windows 2000 or Windows 7.

Windows 2000 Professional was peak Windows for me. Skipped XP etc thanks to mac. Then 7 for a while.

This is the correct answer. Win2k was probably the most solid and cruft-free release that they did.

Then the enshittification started with Window XP, jelly-mold/curved glass buttons, activation, and .NET everywhere, followed by the disaster that was Vista.

They released Windows 7, and somehow then decided, yet again, to screw things up with Windows 8 because 'mobile'.

If only .NET was actually everywhere like Swift on Apple, or Java/Kotlin on Google land.

Instead we keep having COM with shitty tooling for the relevance it has on the OS API surface, especially since Vista.

Windows 2000 was the last version of the Windows NT lineage with Dave Cutler in charge of everything.

His no-nonsense attitude towards fixing known bugs was sorely missed in later versions as Windows quality began its decline.

I'd replace 9x by windows 2000. It was the only decent windows. 9x were BSOD crashfest, 2000 was stable as NT but without the enshittification of XP (ugly default themes, stuff above calling internet services with zero value).

I think what you describe as responsive are 2 things:

1. absence of animations. I don't know about windows but on linux DE you can disable them, it feels snappier but more raw and I think most people still prefer the animations.

2. Visual and audio clues. Back in the days we were on spinning disks so anytime you'd click on somethimg you would hear the disk moaning in pain and see that disk led blinking. You knew that something was happening, even if it took a long time. When SSD were introduced, everything became instant and silent for a few years, it was pure bliss. Then over the last decade apps continued growing and growing in size and as fast as they were SSDs and NVME started not feeling that fast because so much stuff had to be loaded into memory. Nowadays many apps are still starting much faster than before but the biggest one still take a substantial time. Worse, we have lost all visual and audio clues that something is happening.

It's interesting how many people don't like the XP theme. I think it was cool, it was productive yet colorful, but I have to wonder if that's just because it arrived when I was at a certain life stage, the same way I had no problem with the COVID lockdown. We used XP in high school computer class the whole time I was there.

It was change. People don’t like change.

It was directional and trendy - which meant it was short lasting. Like building your UI based on floaty 3D shapes 5 years ago, except these days it's much easier to change when you start to look silly.

Ah, yeah, I can see how if you had worked with the 9x theme for 10 years you'd prefer it didn't change. (Conversely I don't think anyone is clamoring for the 3.1 theme back) But XP did include that theme and it was pretty simple to select it.

In the good Microsoft tradition, you had programs where this theme will not be applied, just like in Win 10 and 11, leading to inconsistencies.

It was much, much, more coherent.

Also there was a trick which I don't remember that allowed to apply the theme on all applications.

Now, the notion of theme don't even exists anymore. It's just web and css and branding colors for whatever software you run.

I always put XP into "Classic Mode"

I for my part didn't like the sparse selection of colors. Blue, silver, green, but nothing reddish. But later there came the Zune theme and it was awesome (silver-black with orange X buttons).

Products have to change in a visible way so people know they're new.

Same with running shoes, and they get worse too..

I’ve been buying the same model of Brooks (the Ghost one) for _years_ because they fit well for me and while they release a refresh every other year or so they feel the same to me when I buy a new pair.

Sure hope they keep producing them because finding a different model that works for me would be kind of shit

I think Windows 9x was peak Windows.

I'd choose XP instead. People disputing the performance maybe should consider the hardware at that time. Real problem with 9x was low-level stability. Juggling with compatibility was difficult, file access comes to mind, it was a kludge. It was possible but hard to maintain the system in a sensible state.

XP was the first to bring NT architecture to desktop. It was a huge success. Many despised the colorful UI, I actually like it. They started moving things around, but annoyances were fixable. Microsoft has adopted more of a "my way or the highway" attitude since.

Yes, maybe XP was the sweet spot between ease of use and ability to revert back to a "classic" Windows interface.

It also had many multimedia features for burning CDs, editing videos, etc..

XP was quite ugly though. 98 or whatever was the best looking, but 7 was probably best overall (because they’d at least somewhat improved the UI and the system was generally more stable and modern).

(FWIW I mostly switched to Linux after XP so this isn’t nostalgia).

People also forget… XP had more than the one tonka-toy theme from Frog Design. There were several themes. Some appealed to my visual tastes, some didn’t… but I do think they were well designed, which is more than I can say for most UI design today.

Wasn't 2000 the first NT architecture on desktop?

2000 is, by far, my favourite Windows OS.

What do you mean by 'on desktop'?

NT has always had both server and workstation versions.

XP also introduced activation, which is one of the reasons I prefer Windows 2000 to XP.

> XP was the first to bring NT architecture to desktop

That was Win2k (DirectX). XP was full of bugs and holes before SP2.

This is because back in the 90s GUI development was still driven by hard research, not by "emotions" (e.g. actually sitting very diverse groups of people in front of computers, asking them to perform specific tasks and then analysing where exactly they got stuck or became confused).

IIRC this golden era of GUI research fell apart once people started to call themselves "UX designers".

> Everything is clear, you know what's a button and what's not. Information density is also high, which is a good thing on a computer screen.

I would say information density was too high. All those always-on indicators: 3D scrollbars, buttons, etc. create a very busy picture. Today's interfaces are much cleaner which comes at a price of less information and hence, more ambiguity, but I for would rather pay that price than go back.

One problem I see is that while the UI itself has been simplified, incidental complexity has crept in other ways. Most importantly, the OSes themselves as software systems have clearly grown ponderous and unwieldy so that today they are more bugs and more of those bugs can be subtle and surprising. Also, there is less uniformity in UX across apps (and UI frameworks).

"Today's interfaces are much cleaner which comes at a price of less information and hence, more ambiguity, but I for would rather pay that price than go back."

If you take today's interfaces to an extreme, you would get a white sheet. Very clean, but unusable. I wouldn't call interfaces "clean" where users increasingly have trouble figuring out what's clickable, how to scroll, move or resize a window.

> I would say information density was too high. All those always-on indicators: 3D scrollbars, buttons, etc. create a very busy picture.

Have you been in nature recently? We've evolved to deal with very busy pictures and parse relevant information from them.

New UIs often don't have relevant information - like what is clickable or scrollable - and that's a problem.

It used to be that grandpa couldn't find a button with his poor eyesight, since everything was cramped and too tiny on the small screens we used to have.

Nowadays the clickable label is hidden behind a tiny hamburger menu that you can't tell apart from a mere stylistic flourish on the massive screens we keep mostly empty. Now neither of us can find the button.

That's progress? Every time I open an old application I breathe a sigh of relief because I can feel the cognitive load decreasing. Not having to put myself in the headspace of the designer to figure out what random geometric shape happens to be interactive is like taking a vacation.

> Have you been in nature recently? We've evolved to deal with very busy pictures and parse relevant information from them.

Have you ever played "spot the bird in the forest"? Let's not turn our interfaces into that. OTOH, I do grant that there are personal preferences in play as well. There is, for example, the phenomenon of Japanese web design previously discussed here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47122789

> New UIs often don't have relevant information

That information is usually implicit. You're supposed to know that a scrollbar will materialize once you've moved the pointer to just left of the right edge of the bounding box. We've interacted with these elements enough to be able to not be confused just because that particular element is not always in my face. Same for 3D buttons, a well-designed interface doesn't need such heavy cueing. A "Send" button shouldn't need any more than the semantics of the word already implies to make it clear it's clickable. Unless one wants to start clicking buttons before reading (and understanding!) the text. It's the UX inconsistencies, design flaws and general bugginess I've already highlighted in my comment that are making this more painful than it needs to be. Though it's not scrollbars that frustrate me on latest macOS, that part works comparatively well as far as I'm concerned.

I think this is a consequence of cultural changes in the last decades. It used to be normal to be able to open a settings window, or any other window, and read it, top to bottom or in any other order, and then you'd know what was there and where it was and which parts you don't care about.

I think it's much better than hidden features practically. But now we've developed this cultural aversion to complex-looking things. Probably started when the iPhone came out with just a flat screen and a button.

> cultural changes

Or the lack of it, FWIW

Lack of changes?

> Today's interfaces are much cleaner

They can do better. Eliminate any distinction between elements and between background and foreground. Cleanliness at its best. Computer are toys anyway, nobody "works" on them anymore. /s

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