[paulmd]

yeah, it's oft-remarked but it's extremely silly how much memory and CPU usage have been inflated over the years. 256MB was just fine for gaming in the early days of XP. windows 98 or windows 2000 could run pretty nicely on like, 64MB - a lot of people ran windows 95 on 16mb even. that's a modern, multitasking desktop OS!

and today you can't boot shit on 16MB.even raspbian or something is going to croak even with XFCE and the lightest-weight setup you can do (short of raw terminal - I did get ubuntu server with fbdev running on a thinkpad with 256MB, although the mach64 driver is in an absolute state at this point).

(menuetOS is a fun regression along this line - a full multiprocessing OS with all the fixings, in x86/x64 assembly, that fits on a 1.44 inch floppy disk)

https://menuetos.net/

I know that a lot of that power and memory has been spent on isolation and security, but part of the reason we need that security is because we've turned the browser and OS into a sandbox running untrusted code loading off the internet. It is interesting to watch this video of linus getting a xserve running (challenging due to cert expiration, discontinued services, etc), and part of the OSX Server Tools suite is things like time machine backup host, ichat host (self-hosted XMPP chat server!) and so on, and the point linus makes is that apple saw the way the wind was blowing and decided it would be more profitable to sell the service than the hardware. And writ large that's the tradeoff we've made from the macos 9 era to the modern one. Slower, browser-based and cloud-based applications instead of self-hosted or local applications.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFnj7LvhvR4

Anyway yes, I have done the same thing as you and original OP and put a mSATA drive in an IDE adapter to get an old machine running, and used a SATA SSD to juice up a cheap laptop when my nice one died in grad school, etc, and a SSD and maxing out the memory (if possible) does make a substantial difference.

People usually tend to think like "it's an old machine, it is running slow anyway" but actually I think it's the opposite and you should think "it's an old machine and it needs all the help it can get". It has little enough processing power already, at least let it progress at the rate of processing and not spend 3/4ths of its cycles waiting for disk!

[mschaef]

> a lot of people ran windows 95 on 16mb even. that's a modern, multitasking desktop OS!

I ran Windows 3.0 on a 16MHz 386sx with 5MB of RAM and a 40MB disk. That's with a graphical word processor, PostScript Fonts, and a set of speedy graphical development tools. (Turbo Pascal for Windows)

In today's world, you'd be hard pressed to find many embedded devices with such minimal specs [1], but in 1991 it was a useful and complete desktop computing environment. [2]

1] Less than ten years later (1998-1999), I was doing embedded development work. The device I was working on would fit in the palm of your hand and ran an AMD Elan SC400 - a 486/33 class device that would've been better than a top of the line desktop PC in 1991-2.

2] In the interest of full disclosure, my next machine was a 486/33, which was followed by a P5-100 a few years later. Both of those machines provided game changing levels of new power. There were important workloads that were enabled by each of the two upgrades. My current machines are a lot better than either of those two, but I don't think any subsequent upgrade was as close to as significant as those two were in terms of local application functionality. (But I don't game.)

[paulmd]

I know, but windows 3.1 looked like windows 3.1. Windows 98 at least looks reasonably modern, like system 7.5+ or system 8 level fit and finish or whatever. Windows 2000 definitely is 90% of the way there in terms of UX. Windows XP really looks more or less like windows 10 if you apply classicshell and turn off the theme, or whatever.

one of those is 64mb to run really nicely, one is 256mb at the start and probably 2GB+ by the end, and the last one is like, you really probably want at least 16, 8 is getting to be a scant spec choice even today. Going for 2x32gb is less than $100 now! (good time to buy, flash and DRAM are glutted and this won't last forever)

NT was solid enough as a UI (although iirc NT 3.5 was sort of "3.11 and a half") but by NT 4 and win2000 it had pretty much emerged into the modern UX. And Win2000 still ran on peanuts by modern standards. I never used NT but my dad generally thought highly of it afaik.

I suppose there's an interesting parallel between macos trying to shed cooperative multitaking (and the legacy of the pre-32 bit ROM) with windows 6/7 and windows finally maturing in the 3.1-95 and NT-win2000 era with shedding the legacy of DOS and the low-level x86 poking. OSs seemed to hit a point in that era where it was no longer tolerable to support their legacy shit forever from the hobby-hardware era.

[mschaef]

> I know, but windows 3.1 looked like windows 3.1.

There were shells even available before Windows 3 that provided a folder style desktop metaphor. HP NewWave immediately comes to mind, and it ran on very limited hardware.

> NT was solid enough as a UI (although iirc NT 3.5 was sort of "3.11 and a half")

NT predated Windows 95. If you weren't paying attention, NT 3.1 and 3.5 looked essentially identical to Windows 3.1. Just with a totally different (much better) implementation and dramatically higher system requirements. They also enabled "32-bit" code, which made it easier to access the large amounts of data needed for image and video manipulation.

The higher system requirements of NT are what motivated Microsoft to also build rudimentary 32-bit support into classic Windows. This started out as Win32s, which enabled Windows 3.1 to run 32-bit apps written to a very strict subset of the Win32 API. Win32s then evolved into the 32-bit support offered by Windows 95, but even then, Windows 95 was a 16/32-bit hybrid. This let Microsoft advertise 4MB system requirements for 95, as opposed to the 16-32 for NT.

> but by NT 4 and win2000 it had pretty much emerged into the modern UX.

NT4's big innovation was to take the new 95 UI and put it on the NT kernel. 2000 was a big step forward, but mainly stability and enterprise featurres.

> And Win2000 still ran on peanuts by modern standards.

IIRC, I ran it usefully on a 256MB P3.

> I never used NT but my dad generally thought highly of it afaik.

I used it for a while, but really only NT4 through about XP. I remember it being a dramatic improvement over 3.x/95 in terms of both features and stability.

Where the Microsoft OS's fall short IMO is that Microsoft has had the resources to pursue all sorts of various designs over the years, but have lacked the coherency of vision to make a product that really feels like it holds together as a consistent whole. The capabilities are there, and in some ways better than Unix, but it's never felt quite right, at least to me.

[jwells89]

I feel like I got a little glimpse of that 90s power scaling when I upgraded from a hand-me-down PowerPC 603ev 200mhz Performa to a PowerPC 400Mhz iMac. The increase in power and responsiveness was well beyond what the increase in clock speed might suggest.

Conversely though, I was surprised by how far an LC 575 with 33mhz 68LC040 I was tinkering with once was able to be pushed, even without hijinks like upgrade cards. I imagine for many users of such machines the impetus to upgrade had more to do with compatible software going extinct than lack of raw power.

[mschaef]

> I feel like I got a little glimpse of that 90s power scaling when I upgraded from a hand-me-down PowerPC 603ev 200mhz Performa to a PowerPC 400Mhz iMac

My first computer upgrade was from a 4.77MHz 8088 to a 16MHz 386SX. Easily over an order of magnitude improvement. Next two upgrades were in the x3-4 range, and after that point I stopped caring. (The upgrade after those two was another x3, but I sold it after a few months and bought a laptop with half the power but would always be with me.)