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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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