good idea on computers with 100 mhz, an encryption algorithm would've probably not slowed down anything at all, especially not because there was no encryption extension.
My 166Mhz Pentium MMX laptop was encrypted too, with the full disk encryption feature of network associates' PGP Desktop. It could handle it fine even without AES-NI. Slower computers also had slower disk access so the burden wasn't big.
I think there was just less focus on security back in those days. We used the same password everywhere, left thumb drives in taxis, used telnet instead of SSH and regular http.
My 166 slows down just from the filesystem itself. I explicitly run jfs, as it is particularly light on cpu. (I believe ext2 is also an option, but you lose journaling).
Not calling you a liar, just very surprised to hear such a report.
Those were very different times though. All software was much lighter. The filesystems of the time were fine on it (and I believe NTFS already had journalling even in those days).
I'm not sure what kind of '166' you have. But you're probably running at least a modern webbrowser as IE 4 is no longer suitable in this day & age. Most sites didn't even use https. You also probably use modern-day crypto. Because it's modern adversaries you want to protect yourself again. By using it to do modern things you're taking it a bit out of context.
I was running Windows 2000 on it, with regular NTFS. I did some webbrowsing and Visual Basic for Applications and ASP development. All this fared just fine with full disk encryption (PGP Desktop's "Whole Disk Encryption").
My older work laptop with Windows NT 4 workstation was also fully encrypted. Also with third-party software of course.
> I'm not sure what kind of '166' you have. But you're probably running at least a modern webbrowser as IE 4 is no longer suitable in this day & age. Most sites didn't even use https.
I'm not sure what sort of impression you got about me, but maybe I should clear things up a little; I was also around for the 90's. I know what the general software situation was, and (unlike most) my impressions aren't buried in 30 years of memory haze and nostalgia either, since I still use such software on occasion. The computer in question is a Compaq Presario from ~1996; it's been upgraded with a 233MHz Pentium MMX that's currently clocked down to 166MHz for... reasons. I've maxed out the RAM at 128MB, about half of which is required to get X up and running on any unix release from this century (win95 fares excellently, win2k is pushing it though).
No, it doesn't run a modern web browser. There's no way in hell you'd get one to run on that hardware. The best you can really do is something like Dillo, or D+, depending on platform (or go text-only). Whether or not I run "modern" software on it, really depends on what that software is. A lot of old tools work just fine, while some modern tools are still somewhat lightweight. It really depends.
I have no experience with FDE on windows. The closest comparison I could draw would be to the built in disk compression utility, which I do seem to recall having a speed impact. I'm not saying it wasn't usable; I'm just saying, from my experience with the hardware of that era, running software of the era, I'm surprised to hear that it could give a reasonable experience. As you say, software was much lighter; meaning, there are many things we do today, that you just didn't do back then --- such as making a full pass over the datastream in your filesystem code.