[commandlinefan]

Well, wait a minute, which part? Commercially available microprocessors back then weren't fast enough to render 3D graphics the way they can today, but otherwise, most of what we do today was perfectly achievable then: if anything, UIs have declined since then because we're putting everything on the web (for pragmatic reasons) rather than writing custom desktop applications.

[MereInterest]

I've of the opinion that anything that was possible 20 years ago should be imperceptibly fast today, unless there is a fundamental physics limitation (e.g. speed of electric signals limiting real-time applications across large distances). Displaying a GUI, opening a file, listing contents of a directory. When the hardware has improved by several orders of magnitude, there is no excuse for being as slow as it was 20 years ago, let alone slower.

[hombre_fatal]

Screens have arbitrary resolution and dimensions these days and they range all the way down to a small phone.

Our state of the art (web) is still evolving towards better solutions to address that. Software in 1990 targeted a couple fixed dimensions and only for a single OS and a desktop input device.

[oblio]

Look at some of the cloud offerings and thing about how long it would take to implement those things from scratch with things available in 1990. Stuff like NLP or Maps.

Back then if you wanted to put a map on your website is was probably impossible. Now it's a widget a 12 year old can put on their website.

[commandlinefan]

Well, he said 1990... there were no websites in 1990. I definitely agree with OP that the stuff that we do on the web today would have been impossible even in 1995 when the web was at least available, but that's because browsers were limited, not because programming was limited. In terms of programming, nearly everything that is done today could be programmed back then using the tools available, we're just dealing with larger volumes and higher latencies today.

[goatlover]

Browsers were quite limited until HTML 5 without using plugins like Flash or Java Applets. And those didn't exist until the mid to late 90s.