[djur]

I see this sentiment again and again, but the Windows 95 experience I remember included frequent spinning hourglasses, blue screens of death from faulty drivers, everything grinding to a halt when memory is near exhaustion or files are being copied between disks, tons of third party applications (and even Microsoft applications, like Office) that disregarded the Windows UI standards, constantly having to run CHKDSK and defrag, not to mention malware/virus vulnerability...

Latency when the system is under low load was definitely better, although a big contributor to that is changes in input and display hardware. But otherwise I'd much rather have today's "bloated" experience over the real world of the '90s.

[troupo]

Thing is, our computers are magnitudes of orders faster than 20-30 years ago. Why isn't our software orders of magnitudes faster? I'll settle for just 10 times faster.

If you take software from 20 years ago, and run it on modern hardware, it will be instant in most operations.

[djur]

Clock speeds certainly aren't orders of magnitude faster than they were 20 years ago. The vast majority of the performance improvements of the past two decades have gone into improved capability, stability, and security. I don't consider streaming 4K video to be "bloat" personally.

[ulfw]

Let's not forget the reinstalls to have the system perform properly again. I must have installed Win94 dozens of times over the years. I've never fresh-installed OS X once. I frankly don't even know how to do that with the current version.