Related to GP's "Software was a lot less capable back then." - somehow, WinAmp 2.x seems to be peak capability of music players; I don't recall any player made later that would be comparable in features for playing local music (with maybe the exception of Foobar2000).
My rose-tinted glasses have some scratches on them, but I still maintain that software of today didn't gain many meaningful features over the late 90s / early 2000s, and yet it grown tremendously in size and resource use.
These days I'm using Foobar2000 and Quod Libet, and have looked at other "music library" type apps, but I'm considering just going with a simple player such as DeaDBeeF, and handle everything else through the file manager, since I've taken the time to properly plan the folder layout. I don't need ratings or playback statistics or all kinds of other things. I need a simple playlist to add music to, with basic playback controls. If I need to add tracks, I'll drag and drop from the file manager.
Basically, I don't need in-between applications between simple WinAMP 2.x style and the all-singing all-dancing streaming services such as Spotify, that do a much superior job with ratings and especially smart playlists.
In 1998, I was using the Internet Explorer COM embeddable COM object to build an IRC client where all of the text rendering was handled by the HTML renderer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. (The reason why is the same as the reason I'd do the same thing today: because fancy text layout in a native app has always sucked and still sucks :/.)
Yes, you need more RAM to load a paragraph of text than an entire OS used to need, but what of it? How's that a meaningful comparison? WinAmp probably ate more RAM than entire OSes 25 years prior to WinAmp.
Also, while you might not be playing videos most of the time, those few times when you need it it's there for you just a click away and it's more efficient than ever before.
Yes, software is very bloated compared to software 25 years ago, but in spite of the efforts of crappy web-infused "desktop apps" like Atom, software today actually consumes less resources proportionally to the amount of computing resources available while delivering more, and also requires less power.
If WinAmp were to play your today's music files and if that were possible (which it isn't, unless you use antiquated audio formats), how much % of CPU would it use and how soon would it drain your laptops battery? My guess is it wouldn't fare very well.
Some was.
WinAmp came out in 1997, 2.x was released in 1998. Real time streaming media.
Visual Studio 6 came out in 1998, had most of Intellisense up and running. The refactoring stuff wasn't there yet, but it could do remote debugging.
The Windows APIs were obtuse, but incredibly well documented.
It'd take a long time before a lot of things we take for granted got commoditized though. A streaming video player (+ server) was still an idea that a billion dollar company could be founded on.
It wouldn't have been hard to write a Slack competitor then. It wouldn't have had streaming video, and the client would have been native, but you could have gotten 80% of the functionality in there, and watched as people still complained it was just a fancy wrapper around IRC.
Web forums sucked though. Slashdot figured out the right idea, the entire conversation loaded at once, one big page, it took the rest of the web a lot time to catch up.
20 years later, I'm writing code, managing files, and have a chat app or two open. The monitor is higher res, and a lot larger. Hardware plug and play finally works, and printing is, on Windows at least, pretty much a solved problem. (Heck even Wi-Fi network printer works almost flawlessly!)
The APIs for writing code have gotten easier to use, but it seems like everyone's documentation is now 5, small, steps above garbage. Also APIs break more often nowadays.
My computer has dozens upon dozens of services running, most of which I don't know what they are. And individual websites take up more RAM than my entire OS used to.
That last part isn't even a joke. To load a few paragraphs of text, hundreds of megabytes of RAM.
It is cool that web browsers can natively play video. 99.9% of the time I don't want them to. I kinda just want that paragraph sitting in the <div id="content"> </div> tag.