[tonoto]

But still, during the time of Windows 95/98 I could hardly play even a 128kbps MP3 with WinAmp in my Pentium 133MHz with 12MB of Ram where I had got rid of lots of bloatware. At the same time I could play it smoothly in Linux with a full blown desktop environment (Window Maker) running. So it was a bad performer in comparison even back then.

[liotier]

Let's not exaggerate: Winamp .mp3 playback was just fine on any Pentium running Windows 9x - though I concede that even my Pentium 75 had 16 MB RAM and I have never seen a Pentium with less than that.

On the other hand, extracting a CD and compressing it's .wav to .mp3 was a whole day of computing, and sending the files as attachments through SMTP was enough to elicit flowery vehement objections from my university's sysadmins and my friend's small ISP alike...

[tonoto]

Alright, it might be that the memory fades and that it was OGG that I were struggling with, nevertheless the music playback worked way better in Linux. My issue I had were modelines/vertical refresh rate and having the graphics card recognized as it were my first computer and as a newbie with no friends to ask it felt rather steep to understand XFree86.

But it was the IBM Aptiva K23 (basically this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEhYumJiEbY ) with 12MB onboard. Later upgraded to the K6-2 (500?) with a real speed bump.

[inferiorhuman]

OGG would make a lot more sense. Even back in the Pentium days I believe there were optimized integer decoders that would handily outperform OGG stuff which only had a floating point decoder. Wikipedia is showing the og Pentium at 0.5 FP ops per clock cycle vs 1.88 integer ops.

Of course by the time you get to the Core architecture you're in the opposite situation where Sandy Bridge is at 16 FP ops and 6.2 integer ops per clock cycle.

[znpy]

Ah the times when the netiquette dictated not to attach large files to emails directed to mailing lists, but to upload them to some ftp server and only paste the link…

The whole industry was had more attention to performance and resources consumption.

[liotier]

Netiquette aside, a bunch of .mp3 as SMTP attachments hogged the single 64 kb/s that was my whole school's single link to the Internet and they entirely filled the receiving side's mail server storage, resulting in an outage... Both valid basis for criticism of my obnoxious behaviour in 1996 !

[ta1243]

> sending the files as attachments through SMTP was enough to elicit flowery vehement objections from my university's sysadmins

The more things change....

OK they don't complain as much about 500kb attachments, but a lot of corporate direction for 20 years is about stopping that behaviour

[bitwize]

The first mp3 I ever played was Jun Kazama's theme from Tekken 2 on a Windows 95 box (Pentium 60) using Fraunhofer's own graphical mp3 player. I had to close all other open applications and not move the mouse around too much, lest the playback start to "crackle". This would've been about 1996, just a few scant months after Damaged Cybernetics, the famed emulation group, announced on their home page: "We are investigating the possibilities of using MPEG Layer III compression for music piracy."

[ptspts]

I had a 486 CPU running at 120 MHz. The WinPlay3 player was able to play MPSs smoothly, WinAMP wasn't.

[toast0]

My Pentium 75 definitely shipped with less than 16MB. I can't remember if we had 4 or 8, but I think we had 16MB when we junked it.

Either way, I played mp3s in winamp while on IRC and sometimes even running netscape. Took at least an hour to get a mp3 though, and I had to throw them all out when I got decent speakers and could hear how terrible they sounded.

[bzzzt]

Strange. I used a dual boot configuration back in the day and found the Windows experience a lot more efficient than the Linux desktop then. It was less stable and secure of course, but Linux drivers were not really optimized and if you wanted a comparable desktop feel you needed something like KDE which needed a lot more memory and felt sluggish compared to Windows. Also, there was rapid development in MP3 decoders at the time, they went from requiring about 100% of the CPU to less than 10% on about every Pentium system.

[dspillett]

> I used a dual boot configuration back in the day and found the Windows experience a lot more efficient than the Linux desktop then.

That was often due to driver support, some hardware not performing as quickly (or sometimes not being as stable) under generic OSS drivers compared to their behaviour with the manufacturer's proprietary binaries (which were quite likely not available for Linux at all). It could be very hit-and-miss, with two otherwise very similar machines performing quite differently due to one controller on the motherboard. Sometimes it was due to the generic driver not knowing for sure that a given device supported faster modes well so erring on the side of caution, a not uncommon example being a drive/controller combination ending up running in PIO mode or an old DMA mode despite supporting something much faster, in which case you could get the performance back with a little “magic” configuration manually telling it to use that better mode.

Generic drives in Windows often had the same problems, but manufacturers tended to make device-specific drivers readily available (usually in the box) for those OSs.

Other times it came down to differing defaults for things like cache modes (write-through or write back, etc), power-saving options, and so forth, which again could be tweaked with config (though the discoverability of these config options was typically not very high).

[bzzzt]

It was also the awful amount of indirection of X(Free86/org) which made sure you had to jump through hoops to get anything on the screen. Even with accelerated hardware X doesn't feel as fast as Windows/macOS due to the insane amount of round-trips for perceived 'network transparency' which doesn't work that great and almost nobody uses.

I find it very disappointing some people are still fighting Wayland which, while not perfect, at least tries to get Linux desktops graphics stack 'on par' with macOS versions from 20 years ago...

[dspillett]

> 'network transparency' which doesn't work that great and almost nobody uses.

Works fine enough, and I use it occasionally to this day (though it is replaced by other things for many tasks these days).

[bzzzt]

Most clients using client side rendering which uses an awful amount of bandwidth and performs bad compared to VNC/RDP is not my idea of 'fine'. Especially not if it's used to justify opposing a better solution.

[dspillett]

For distant remote access with particularly animated or graphically detailed applications, perhaps. Though I'd not argue VNC as being lower bandwidth except where you've got it tuned to massively compress to the point where things that are bad through X are bad in different ways through VNC. RDP usually does better in this respect, as do some less common protocols.

[darksim905]

I call bullshit. Windows 95/98/2000 did not have any bloatware....

[M95D]

My first "This is bloatware!" moment was when Win98 integrated Internet Explorer into the desktop shell. I didn't knew what bloatware was until then.

[darksim905]

Were there even other browsers back in '98 other than I think Netscape? How else would you have been expected to download, or utilize, the Internet? If a core component is considered bloatware, something is wrong.

[tonoto]

It got worse with Windows ME but yes I felt that Windows 98 had lots of stuff to be removed. I were impressed at first glance with Windows Memphis until I realized it was the same as Windows 95 and I started to explore different shells as alternative to explorer.exe and I believe it was Litestep with a simple skin I got my best performance from.. but as I, had a better experience in Linux (besides graphics resolution) which I hade newly explored I booted into Windows less, and less...

[exitb]

I remember being able to watch bootleg movies on a Windows 2000, while Windows 98 was too slow on the same hardware. I suspect that had nothing to do with bloatware, but rather some internal inefficiencies while dealing with heavy CPU/memory/IO load.

[gattilorenz]

Hah! I remember watching the first Matrix as DivX on a P200MMX with a 14” Compaq CRT. I had to use a Dos movie player (without starting Windows), as in Windows 98 it was way too slow.

[M95D]

QVPro? It's still on the internet! http://www.multimediaware.com/qv/

[gattilorenz]

Possibly, it seems to ring a bell but I should launch it to confirm. I’m pretty sure teenager me didn’t actually buy the pro version :)

[loloquwowndueo]

I call bullshit on your call. Don’t you remember active desktop? That was as bloated as anything and crashed all the time. People having a IE crash screen as their wallpaper and being clueless as to how to get rid of it, was hilarious.

[darksim905]

To be fair, that wasn't 'on' by default, and it wasn't necessarily bloatware, as it's a small activex module/component. It's actually fairly light with how well it works from a code-base perspective! but, it's akin to malware more than anything since it's inception.

[tonoto]

It was a fun prank to replace someones desktop to an active desktop.

[nunez]

Win9x/2000 didn't ship with bloatware but the OEMs that pre installed those OSes sure did.