[blowski]

Things I didn't use my 1998 PC for:

* realtime collaborative spreadsheet editing

* 28 inch high definition monitor

* watching movies in HD

* playing almost lifelike games

* browsing an extremely hostile internet

* live backing up all my files

* Running large complex scripts on the same machine I can easily carry in one hand

* Running an IDE like JetBrains

I could go on. We are only doing the "same tasks" if you ignore a lot of the details.

[FirmwareBurner]

Add to that that Windows XP had no antivirus built in, heck it didn't eve ship with a bloody firewall to block incomign connections, so you got immediately pwned the moment you plugged into the internet or a USB drive from school. Then you installed a third party firewall and anti-virus solution and performance went to shit.

Yeah, it felt faster than today's equivalent at similar task, but at what cost.

If I strip out the catalyst, locks, interior and seats form my car, it will also go faster and give me better fuel economy but that doesn't really make it usable for me now.

[M95D]

But that's a plus!

People were educated about cyber-risks in a real-life, non-corporate-bullshit, non-give-me-a-break-eyes-rolling way.

And then they installed Tiny Personal Firewall which was miles better than even current windows' firewall.

[FirmwareBurner]

>But that's a plus! People were educated about cyber-risks in a real-life

No it wasn't, no they weren't. That's like saying that growing up in a rough neighborhood where you can get shot, or getting drafted into war, is good for you because it builds character and teaches you to protect yourself.

A bullshit OS full of security vulnerabilities is no fun or useful for any user or business. Yeah, it indirectly helped me in my childhood better understand security, threats and troubleshooting, but overall these faults were a net negative for humanity.

>And then they installed Tiny Personal Firewall

No they didn't. I did tech support at the time. Most XP PCs has whatever bullshit solution from Zone Alarm, Kaspersky, McAfee, etc was cheaper or more advertised at the time. If they had anything to begin with that is, otherwise they were full of Bonzi-Buddy, Strip-Girl animated spyware that came with your DivX player installation or via the usual 'Eminem - Lose Yourself.mp3.exe' Limewire download.

[moron4hire]

  > \* realtime collaborative spreadsheet editing
  > \* live backing up all my files

These are broadband adoption and bandwidth issues and don't explain why the OS has grown. We had real-time networked apps in 1998. We had networked file-sharing and backups.

  > \* 28 inch high definition monitor
  > \* watching movies in HD
  > \* playing almost lifelike games
  > \* Running large complex scripts on the same machine I can easily carry in one hand
  > \* Running an IDE like JetBrains

These are hardware scaling issues and don't explain why the OS has grown. And we had IDEs in 1998.

  > \* browsing an extremely hostile internet

Better sandboxing of the browser explains (though only partially) why the browser has grown, but doesn't explain why the OS has. If anything, the browser grew (in functionality and thus size) because the OS didn't (in functionality), so why did it (in size)?

[FirmwareBurner]

>Better sandboxing of the browser explains (though only partially) why the browser has grown, but didn't explain why the OS has

Because the same kind of sandboxing happens on OS level now as well. In Windows 9X days the apps could access the hardware directly but not anymore for safety and security. Everything is now layers upon layers of sandboxing that must talk to the HW via APIs.

>because the OS didn't (in functionality)

Didn't it though? Or are we being needlessly snarky?

I don't remember Win 98 having on-line automatic OS update and automatic driver update, firewall, heuristic anti-malware, DirectX 12 support(check the featurelist compared to DX 5), support for multi-core 64bit CPUs, PAEX, NVME SSDs, WiFi, multiple high-dpi screens, virtualization(Hyper-V), USB4 & Thunderbolt, accelerated fancy transparency in the GUI, etc.

Yes, some of those features are hardware related, but having the OS support all those new HW features and exposing it reliably and securely it to the userspace adds bloat in from of binary code that makes all that work seamlessly.

All of those features and support for all that newer faster hardware, are a given now but were unheard of in consumer OS back then when PCs had the complexity of a toaster by comparison.

So let's stick to the facts, not emotionally driven rose tinted glasses.

> so why did it (in size)?

Because as HW became powerful and cheaper, it made it less profitable for SW companies to hyper optimize everything like they were dong in the Win9X days with assembly and stuff. It would be a needless expense that brings no ROI.

Yeah Win11 is needlessly overbloated compared to WinXP, but people said the same about WinXP when it launched, compared to Win98, and they said the same about Win95 when it launched, compared to DOS. Where does the buck stop? At the Altair 8800? Pretty sure that had no bloat.

[Amezarak]

Well, I watched HD video on my 1999 PC, and it worked fine. I had to resize it to fit 1600x1200; I don't know what all is going on behind the scenes to play a 1080p-encoded video in that situation. But it worked great. You don't need moder hardware for HD monitors at all.

> * Running an IDE like JetBrains

We had Visual Studio, which also worked great, and with WinForms was undoubtedly one of the best GUI app development tools of all time.

> * browsing an extremely hostile internet

I did this well into the 2000s, although I was an early Firefox evangelist and mostly used that when it came out, plus eventually NoScript as JS was continually used to enshittify the web.

[rafram]

Even the software that existed then has become an order of magnitude more capable. Try running 2023 Emacs or Microsoft Word on a 90s PC…

[pjmlp]

As I watch many people using their UNIX like computers, as if time has stood still in 1980's terminals, I would say it that 2023 Emacs would do just fine.

Really, entering in some coffe shop coding sessions, is hardly any different from an IBM X Windows terminal into a DG/UX session in the university computer lab, now they are using a laptop and something else instead of twm or an ambar based text terminal.

[rafram]

My point is that the software we run now is significantly more resource intensive, even if its name hasn't changed. Emacs is slow on 2023 hardware. It would likely be unusable on 90s hardware.

[pjmlp]

Emacs means eight megabytes and constantly swapping for a reason.