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You must have used a different Win95 than I did. Slow and buggy in nearly everything. Had you said Win2000 or XP, I might have agreed more, except that they were really slow. My windows laptop boots up in about 5-10 seconds, and it is rare that something crashes on it.

Seems more rose-tinted glasses than anything.



No, I'm aware how buggy Windows 95 was. I used Windows 98 SE, which was still slow, and would occasionally just get stuck in an uninterruptible "non-fatal" BSOD, hang, BSOD loop before deciding that actually, it is a fatal error after all. From its reputation, I imagine Windows 95 was worse in both respects. I am comparing modern computers to this. Rose-tinted glasses my foot: I am pointing at a computer that would assume the delete key was held (for no identifiable reason) at boot,¹ and I am saying it's more predictable, less buggy, and faster than modern computers.

It took under three minutes to cold boot (~5 seconds from hibernation), took less than a second to load a static HTML page from the 2GB hard drive, and could play tanks.swf[0] for hours without spinning up the fan.

Compare that to modernity: your average Windows 10 machine will normally refuse to cold boot in favour of "fast startup" (basically hibernation) because it takes so long to start normally. If you try that anytime, good luck getting to "I can type with less than a second's lag between a keypress and the character appearing on the screen" in less than ten minutes. If you have an SSD, 16GB of RAM and an octacore processor, you might be able to get that down to 3 minutes – juuuust about edging out the "wait for it to boot, double-click on a document, and wait two seconds for Wordpad to open" of 1999 laptop hardware and software. (And if you give those resources² to Windows 98 it'll boot the whole OS and have your file open in less time than it takes Microsoft Teams to hide its splash screen.)

In a modern web browser, it usually takes less than a second to load a static HTML page. But sometimes it just takes upwards of 10 seconds, sitting there and spinning on a blank page with a blank address bar and (aside from the fan noise) no apparent sign of life.

And… well, good luck with tanks.swf these days; without active cooling, you can feel the temperature difference through the case. My laptop³ went up over 10°C with the fan. A simple Flash game where the majority of the gameplay is stationary graphics idles at half a core, averages one-and-a half cores and peaks at ~2.8 cores (70% CPU utilisation).

I think it's fair to say that computers have got worse.

[0]: https://archive.org/details/tanks_flashgame

¹: Yes, it would beep incessantly during the DOS phase of the boot sequence (BIOS beep, then a pause, then a faster, higher-pitched beep I can only assume came from WIN.COM), then proceed to try to delete all the files on the desktop once the desktop loaded. If you timed it right, though, you could tap the delete key before the first beep, and save yourself the hassle of waiting for the keyboard buffer to drain.

²: Minus the RAM, of course; that's enough to overflow its 32-bit address size and make its memory allocator think there's no RAM.

³: 4 (logical) core Intel i5-5200U @ 2.20GHz, with integrated GPU




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