I used excel and word, had windowing operating systems, and databases.

Sure they didn't scale as much or have embedded video, but in terms of "did they do function X"? Yes they all worked fairly well.

The massive horsepower gains are REALLY noticeable in the evolution of games. But outside of that in "productivity"... ye gods we are wasting horsepower to basically do the same crap we used to do.

What is really really exasperating is when any app freezes for multiple seconds. I start counting 4 billion... 8 billion... 12 billion (assuming 4 billion instructions per second). How does that happen with having 1000x the horsepower?

And the RAM we waste these days. Windows ran in 4 MB! And 16GB is too small these days for development?

Moore's law is dying. Software stacks need to start optimizing themselves.

> I used excel and word, had windowing operating systems, and databases. Sure they didn't scale as much or have embedded video ...

Word for Windows almost certainly supported embedded videos. WordPerfect for Windows certainly did, and I seem to recall it being based upon OLE (a Microsoft technology). This was in the Windows 3.1 era.

> ... but in terms of "did they do function X"? Yes they all worked fairly well.

The answer is truly an, "it depends." Some modern software is much more powerful. Other software feels like a throwback to the 8-bit era with a shimmering veneer. I used to think that this was a product of web and mobile development effectively forcing developers to start again from scratch, but I am starting to believe that most modern developers lack the ability to implement features that aren't provided by a framework.

A lot of the RAM usage can be explained by users expecting crisp fonts and icons on 4K screens. That's quite a lot more data than in VGA.

That's true to a point, but... is that just being lazy? Aren't those all in "compressed" vector maps and could be rendered as needed with video hardware?

Don't get me started on icons. Icons, if anything, have gotten progressively worse somehow with more resolution and colors. It's almost like the reduced color palette caused more sudden color transitions and communicated the icon's purpose back in the day.

Which might have underpinned material design... but that entire movement, at least its major expressions (e.g. Windows 8/x) is an utter disaster.

For a lot of software that is not really true, especially on the client side. A lot of LoB software doesn't demand anything more; frontends with a bit of logic on top of a db. The fact that you get a lot of things out of the box does not mean they are required or expected. I guess everything working with a mouse would be the one thing that is expected, but that could be done in '96, just TP for DOS was not the best choice for that. You would take Delphi 2 for that if you were into Pascal.

But sure there is software that does a lot more as well, luckily we did progress.

But don't forget there are millions of (mostly Windows) programs in the world which could've been (and are still!) from that era or long before (Cobol machines in the basement).

Software did less in 1996. That's why it was so much better! :-)

That's actually not a terrible point :).

I do remember WordPerfect (the DOS version) being absolutely incredible... in no small part because you could "reveal codes" (or whatever the name of that feature was). I helped my dad produce a couple of textbooks using WP and the most difficult thing we ever encountered was... printer drivers. (Which is still a pain point today if you're not using Windows/Mac.)

I remember so well being ashamed that PC users were still typing docs in such primitive UIs while I was "desktop publishing" with WYSIWYG on my Atari ST. "Reveal codes" blergh a modern computer should be better than that!

30 years later, I love writing markdown and stay away from GUI rich text editors as much as I can.

As one of those PC users, that could only use Amiga 500 from friends during weekend meetups and demoscene parties, I definitely don't miss those days of only having c:\> to work with.

Frankly, that's a pain point even if you're using Windows or Mac.

Ah. I've been out of the ecosystem for so many years. It used to be simple on those platforms... :/

It’s an exaggeration to say it’s a pain point on Mac for most printers. I’m sure some aren’t supported by the standard flow, but that flow is literally “select your printer which is already identified, agree to download a driver and wait a bit”. It’s as painful as installing a web extension if you don’t have to go find it first.

Well, except your printer now has its own OS, and asks to be connected to the Internet so it can download security updates it wouldn't need if it wasn't connected to the internet.

Huh? This isn’t something I’ve ever heard of from Apple’s distribution of printer drivers. Neither of the Brother printers I’ve used since this system was put in place (Snow Leopard, widely regarded as the high water mark for macOS quality) have required or requested network access other than for availability. Are you talking about something specific that’s well documented or just being paranoid and sharing careless inference?

I was talking about the printers themselves. Back then you just worried about the drivers on your computer, now you have to keep in mind that your printer needs to update its firmware on its own.

But I don’t need to worry about either. My OS vendor distributes it and I trust their distribution model. My printer has no say at all.

We still don't do much more customer-facing, we just do a lot more internally. Just judging actually useful features, I'd put a lot of DOS software on favorable grounds compared to your average immutable functional serverless Kafka-backed hexagonal 12 factor SOLID web app.

They most definitely could do a lot[1].

There was also overlays[2][3] and extended memory (EMS/XMS) which made it possible to use quite a lot of memory.

[1]: https://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/all/ui-museum-turbo-pascal-...

[2]: http://www.oocities.org/~franzglaser/tpsrc/overlaytxt.html

[3]: https://secondboyet.com/articles/publishedarticles/theslithy...

Yes. I programmed in Turbo Pascal and (later on) Delphi. I am not unfamiliar with these systems.

I agree.

Saving stuff to harddisk with 8.3 file name notation and working on super-crappy monitors is still a dealbreaker, not to mention Git.

I recently wrote a little demo on Amiga 500, 68k Motorola. And it was excruciating.

Today's software development is sometimes unfortunate, but I find the benefits more remarkable than in the 90th.

Isn't lowering your expectations the secret to happiness?