Anyone can watch this video [1] to see how long it actually took to boot up or launch Word. But bootup seems to take 20 seconds, and launching Word took 7 seconds. Which roughly matches my memory.
So about an order of magnitude slower than you're describing. (The SE/30 had a clock speed twice that of the SE, but launching things is mostly bound by the hard drive speed.)
Other things like saving a 3-line Word document took 6 seconds. Quitting Word took 6 seconds. Basically, everything was pretty slow back then.
In contrast, I just tried launching Word on my M1 MacBook, and it took about three quarters of a second. While saving a file is simply instantaneous. And launching Photoshop takes 7 seconds.
Edit: here's another video [2] opening Photoshop 2 which takes a full 28 seconds.
which got slower and slower taking swap speed with it, which slowed down everything you were actually using. You'd defrag the drive regularly and that wouldn't do it so you'd have to wipe and reinstall from scratch. And that was some hours of work but like having a brand new machine again when you were done. You couldn't believe how bad it had degraded to. The good old days or selective memories?
Defragging is one of those clear cases for time shifting things from your high value time to your low value time.
I'll try to make a video on real hardware once I have time to show that I'm not exaggerating. And remember that the SE/30 is a computer from 89, so not even early 90s.
But this matches my memory as well -- Photoshop was by far the slowest program I had at the time to start up. I remember being bored waiting because it just took forever to load. While applications like Word definitely took several seconds to load, but that wasn't such a big deal.
Of course, all of this was a vast improvement over the several minutes it would take loading programs on my Commodore 64 a few years prior... from cassette tape! ;)
I used an SE/30 well into the late 90s as a kind of boutique writing appliance. I never used Word, I used BBEdit, which opened rather quickly. I always felt getting the machine up and going was faster than a standard Windows desktop.
The SE/30 was a hell of a machine. I set up an SE for a friend in the mid-90s for her to write papers on, and she really liked using it and never complained about the speed (and she did use Word). Which is saying something, because the SE was kind of a dog.
A fresh System 7 install on an SE/30 would boot from a hard drive in ~20 seconds. Adding system extensions could double this pretty easily.
In fact, I'm going to directly relate this to Wirth's Law. I think there was a brief span of years where software didn't get slower as quickly as hardware got faster. My experience of the early 90s was that my computer was slow as hell, and those of my more well-heeled friends were incredibly fast.
I mean, we all know the answer was 0. Hell, the systems you're talking about were likely not networked at all. I have a feeling that if we took all the 'slow' software we're talking about and cut out all the pieces reaching for the network in one place or another that we'd gain about an order of magnitude of speed back. Of course we'd lose about that much in functionality.
Word would start in less than a second (not sure which version it was), and most features we use today were available. Adobe Photoshop 3.0 would start in less than 3 seconds, and same with Premiere 1.0.
Of course you lacked some memory protection features which could make the whole computer crash because of a single program failure, but daily experience was much better on old systems. They felt way faster because they have less input lag and because UI was less bloated.
I'm not saying 1990s computer and software were better, but they were way faster than what we use today.