Indeed. I recently took out my Pentium 133 MHz running Windows 98 and Office 97. Same, if not more pleasant experience, than modern Windows machines. Very little has changed in principle besides animations and advertisement.

Try dosbox on a raspberry pi. Win 3.11 flies (office and all), though I'm running it on a giant desktop these days.

I haven't bothered with Win 95/98 emulation, since I mostly use that setup for games, and Steam already has modern-ish windows games covered.

IceWM takes less than 20MB of RAM - it represent Windows 98 quite well.

Full featured DEs offer features far exceeding what Windows 98 had: applets, advanced window management, 24bit graphics (Windows 98 icons were mostly 8bit) + transparency, a ton of convenient APIs. Coding in pure Win32 is quite difficult.

not sure what exactly you mean with applets and especially advanced window management

IceWM is far more advanced/usable than Windows 98 wrt window management (and better than modern Windows, since things like the TaskBar have regressed heavily).

I used to run this version of enlightenment + slackware(?) on a 25MHz 386 with 8MB (or was it 4MB?) of RAM:

http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/July1998/article52.html

Compared to windows 3.1, the default theme flew, and visually, it was way ahead of Win 98. I remember getting pseudo transparency working, but I think that was in the pentium 100Mhz days. Other than that, it checked all the other boxes on your list.

> Coding in pure Win32 is quite difficult.

True, but Delphi with its VCL showed it didn't have to be.

Delphi produced quite bloated code.

I remember a default Delphi application with 0 lines of actual code showing nothing but an empty screen compiled into something like 300KB circa 2000 all thanks to VCL while its pure C Win32 counterpart compiled into a few kilobytes.

300kB. How goalposts moved since then.

LMAO.

Yeah, an average HTML page nowadays without graphics and built-in fonts is easily above 500KB considering all the embedded JS and CSS.

If you use an alternative set of libs, such as KOL&MCK, you get fully featured GUI programs in tens of KB range (about 50KB for an empty window with a button, IIRC) while having all the benefits of the coolest RAD which Delphi/Lazarus provide.

...And then you UPX it to shave some more bits. ;)

IIRC it included the runtime libraries. In the case of VB you had to install them in addition to your software (and I think they were bigger).

Today you can download the .NET runtime quickly and semi automatically, but back in the day you had to make sure the user had them, so you included them in the bundle anyways...

I'm all for a good hyperbole. Sure, there's plenty of unnecessary and bloated features in modern Windows. Notably the memory leaking garbage news widget. But there's also plenty of useful features. Multiple desktops, search, multi window handling etc.

FVWM ran under 8MB almost as fast and it had far more features window-managing wise.

On "the same features".... no. Not even close. No Unicode, no CJK input with IBUS, no GVFS/Kio for thousands of protocols and devices (MTP), no memory protection...

I remember that when my father upgraded for a k6 II machine I adopted his old pentium 100mhz (overclocked from 90) with 40MB of ram and it was less than snappy in win98.

It was actually the reason I started using linux, to maximise the use of the resources. On win98 that machine was pretty much single task while on linux I could use command line and tui applications to play music, work on a school document with abiword or staroffice, chat with irc/ICQ/jabber while browsing with netscape/mozilla then phoenix/firebird. On windows 98 listening to mp3 on winamp audio was quickly stuttering if I was doing other stuff at the same time.

Funny this. 20+ years ago I had a similar (K6 II) machine w/Win98. I used one of those sketchy "IE Extractor" apps downloaded from who-knows-where to remove IE and replaced it with Mozilla. Performance increased noticeably; apps opened near-instantaneously upon clicking.

Since then, I've never had a PC/OS combo as fast as that. Need to work on that now...

You could use groff+mom for school docs.

Yeah but those were my formatting year. I remember a lot of people recommending latex which led me to start using lout[1] for a while which felt easier to learn and had a much smaller installation footprint.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software)

Dude, right?

Where has all this new resource usage come from?

In middle school my family XP computer had 512MB of RAM total, and absolutely nothing has changed since then.

Why is everything so fat now?

Win98 was a turd. Even SE crashed a lot. No memory protection. No daemons to mount zillions of remote drives or USB devices with GVFS/Kio.

Guess why NT based OSes used far more memory.

>Firefox - SJW_crap = better,smaller,faster,securer. But SJW_crap became their primary objective so we're doomed...

IE+Active X+OLE+Windows 98 = malware haven. Firefox supports audio/video securely, and even WebGL support. And WASM. Yes, you could do that with Flash and a Pentium III with Street View, but your computer was an ad-ridden malware epidemic party.

You've chosen to miss the point, and you're also comparing sand to ice.

win98lite, was windows install modification for win98 to remove some stuff so you could play computer games more while you weren't defragging your hard drive.

Wakey wakey.

I know w98lite. My first Windows OS was W98SE. And, guess, what? Often tuning some registry keys gave me more performance than blindly using W98lite.

Good for you.