I used a 100mhz Pentium with 64MB or memory and, later, a 166mhz Pentium with 128MB. Win98 (people are correct that midis were way more common in the ‘95 days, as even a 2MB mp3 would take forever to download on dial-up and hard drives were small) and my experience was than any OS was fine if you were only playing mp3s, but on anything but BeOS or QNX you’d get bad pops and UI lag if you did anything else while a song way playing. Linux was actually worse about this than Windows, in fact, but both were bad.

I had a pentium mmx 200mhz with 32mb ram running windows in 1997. I could run winamp or realplayer, and at the same time I could download using get right, chat on mIRC, browse the internet using netscape and still had a file manager window open. All at the same time.

Changing from one window to another allowed me to see widgets been drawn. It wasn't snappy, but it wasn't a crawl. I could still open a dos window and run qbasic or turboC. I had to be careful: drunk pointers risked stability of the system.

At the time I never had the same thrashing problems I have today running linux. That is why I'm so hopeful about systemd-oomd.

I could keep the machine like this for almost a whole day. A windows 9x machine rarely passed 24 hours uptime with heavy usage without a bluescreen.

I later upgraded the machine to 64mb ram, 2 harddisks, 2 floopy drives and both cd drive bay became occupied: one with a cdrom drive and the other with a cd burner. I then replaced the winmodem with a network card. It was a good machine. The only thing that barred me from using linux on it was the soundcard (AZT-R2316) that had no linux driver. It 2mb s3 video card worked better with linux. By the time the sound drivers arrived it was 2007 and I already had a new linux-only 2006 machine.

With Linux, FVWM which was damn lightweight (and still is), and some "nice" sttings I was able to do it better than W98. Rxvt was far lighter than XTerm. Most software was for the cli after all.

Fluxbox/blackbox was even lighter. I think lightweight linux distributions, like damm small linux, could run faster than windows 9x. Unfortunately, easy to use, highly compatible, lightweight linux distros only became popular after the win9x era.

Actually, FVWM was lighter than even Blackbox, check it up.

On "highly compatible", well, you could run mandrake and send drakconf and KDE to the trash.

Mandrake was slow to boot on a 90's class machine compared to damn small linux. Also "run mandrake and send drakconf and KDE to the trash" doesn't ticks the "easy to use" box.

At that time I was running IRIX. Had none of those problems.

Winamp was 1997.

I remember there was one software decoder that was fast enough in 1995, so I plugged in my Pentium/100 laptop to decode music and pass it uncompressed to my desktop Pentium/90 (which was too slow) over 10base-T!

I still have bootable Cyrix 133MHz that has MP3’s on the hard drive, they wouldn’t be there if it couldn’t play them.

Being possible != being practical

It was possible, practical and happened. Collections were smaller because drives were smaller. MP3 became more popular by the end of the 90's, but a good 1995 machine, 100mhz pentium with 8mb of ram and 512mb harddisk, was 100% practical for playing mp3.