> That's my point, the software was getting bloated at least as fast as the CPUs were getting faster
I think there's a difference between bloat and actually useful features or performance.
For example, I started making music with computers in the early 90s. They were only powerful enough to control external equipment like synthesizers.
Nowadays, I can do everything I could do with all that equipment on an iPad! I would not call that bloat.
On the other hand, comparing MS Teams to say ICQ, yeah, a lot of that is bloat.
> in the early 90s. They were only powerful enough to control external equipment like synthesizers.
Tell that to ScreamTracker!
In case anyone's wondering:
https://youtu.be/roBkg-iPrbw
Screamtracker was sampling. Great for the days and much more accesible for the teenager I was than buying and controlling synths but that was not exactly same. More a competition to the early akai MPCs.
And we were mostly ripping those samples from records on cassettes and CDs, or other mods.
Well now that you mention that, my very first steps actually were with Soundmonitor on a C64, one of the OG trackers probably (even though not called tracker yet IIRC). I kind of forgot about that, as that was still very amateurish (I mean what I made with it, not the software).
https://www.c64-wiki.de/images/f/f1/rockmon3.png
Or also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw&t=400s in the video already linked below. And yes, I had to type in that listing.
There is definitely bloat. A few months ago I was messing about with making a QWERTY piano in a web page, and it was utterly unplayable due to the bloat-induced latency in between the fingers and the ears.