System 7 and Mac OS 8 were pretty good from a UI perspective, but no memory protection and no preemptive multi tasking was not great. For a long time "MacOS 9" was synonymous with classic Mac, but I always remember 8 being the last tolerable one, by the time 9 came around the foundations were more clearly inadequate, it was like the WinME of Mac OS, tiding over until OS X.
> OS X 10.3
Yes. I remember some commentary on the first few versions of OS X was that they were resource hogs.
also, than the bsdi bsd/os workstations in the same room with them, and those were the same hardware win95 ran on
But if you had a few megabytes to spare for caching (not everybody did, for sure) the machines would be snappy, because the UI was.
However on the Pentium MMX@200MHz with 32MB of RAM i had ~1996/97 it was very snappy. On the same machine i also ran my first Linux, Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 in 1999, with KDE1 where it also felt very fast.
Also in the last few years disk I/O optimization took a massive nosedive, especially under Windows. My 2013 laptop has a ~5400rpm HDD was so unusable with Windows 10 that even the login screen crossfade animation stuttered from disk I/O and updates took literally hours. Meanwhile Windows 8, released only a few years prior, was able to boot my older 2008 laptop from power on to desktop in ~22 seconds (i was so impressed at the time that i uploaded a video of the boot process [0]).
If you are used to the recent awful I/O performance it can be hard to imagine things not always being like that.
Besides you can also check a bunch of YouTube videos with old computers running Win95, here is a short one i found that goes through the bootup process and clicks around the OS for a bit.[1] The computer in the video is actually slower than the one i personally had too.
Windows 3.x you could get away with 4 MiB. And that and Office 1.0 could fit in 100 MiB. Even then, we complained about it.
Though playing mp3 was a heavy task consuming most of the CPU. It was hard to do anything while listening to music.
Or think about how pressing Ctrl-S once a minute became a reflex, because MS Office crashed so often.
Hell, anyone remembers how unstable Windows ME was? Or how desktop Linuxes were practically non-existent?
Current state of software is _amazing_ compared to what was available at that time.
Surely there are downsides to telemetry and tracking, but they can be useful for development.
XP broke the subsystem isolation of NT in favor of enabling Windows non-NT types of drivers with higher levels of kernel/GPU efficiency due to less isolation. This also brought in the ability of the drivers to crash the kernel.
And that, my friends, was the end of rock solid Windows NT stability.
I was on the Windows team during the XP SP2 years. Stability was somewhat reachieved by an intense focus on defensive coding to detect rogue driver and the establishment of the WHQL, or Windows Hardware Quality Lab. WHQL was basically an investment in driver analysis tools and a moderately sized team inside MSFT who's sole job was to debug and fix other people's drivers.
It's not a good replacement for isolation though, and it requires sustained continuous effort by both MSFT and the windows hardware partners, which imho hasn't continued.
Cyrix MX166 PR200 with 32 MB of RAM was playing MP3 just fine while compiling the (linux) kernel and being snappy in the same time.
The SW has just become more bloated. SW engineers those days are not constrained by resources and this leads to a lot of bad practice.
You mean how did we get to a point where :
- I don't have to mash Ctrl+s because software crashers constantly
- segfaults are not a daily occurrence
- any random executable can't crash the OS (hell modern windows can survive a GPU driver crash)
- I can use the internet relatively safely
- I don't need to restart my device after every install
etc. ?
Edit: Forgot all the random software doing auto updates and notifying me about it as I go.
Windows has to chose defaults for a huge audience, if you daily drove it it would probably just work. Way better than 95 would.
More like, "if you daily drove it you'd get used to all the awfulness".
You should also be aware that early android/ios phones did all this in "modern times" on limited hardware by today's standards.
> You mean how did we get to a point where :
> - I don't have to mash Ctrl+s because software crashers constantly
Office 365 would like to dissagree. Not constantly but not reliable either.
> - segfaults are not a daily occurrence
Just because Teams just dies without writing something on the console.
> - any random executable can't crash the OS (hell modern windows can survive a GPU driver crash)
Yes, but a docking station is the last straw. Power management on USB is hard.
> - I can use the internet relatively safely
Relatively
> - I don't need to restart my device after every install
But after every update ...
> etc. ?
We are living on a planet that's revolving and evolving ...
There were no guardrails. There was no borrow checker. There was no ASAN. There was no valgrind. Christ, you barely had a debugger. You couldn't copy and paste answers from ChatGPT or Stack Overflow: you either RTFM and comprehended it, or your code didn't work at all.
Today, we spend an enormous amount of compute, memory, and latency compensating for the modal developer being unable to do safe memory management or concurrency.
I have a work account that I can use to log into all my devices. All my docs and even the stuff on my desktop is magically synced and backed up, and I even have versions. I can open a visio on my laptop in the kitchen, draw some stuff while I wait for the coffee, then go sit on my desk and keep working on that file. When I go for a refill, it's still open in the kitchen and I keep working. Yes - one document, open at the same time on 2 machines, changes being synced live on the screen w/o closing.
When I change my preferences to not select the entire word at a time, it magically saves in every outlook install on all my machines. Plug something in and the driver for it is magically downloaded and installed. Have disk? Remember that? Different sizes and shapes and density monitors? Monitors - many of them.
Gramma can use the computer now - you don't need a geek. Yes, the gramma interface is annoying for the tech user, but the tech user can easily put in a new window manager or tweak registry - the new dumbed down default opened computers to everyone - not just geeks. Tracking? Hmm, don't see any. Maybe because you can (a) turn it off, and (b) you can install a version w/o it. Yes, if you install the consumer version of Windows made for gramma, it will track everything. That's because it's for gramma, and tracking helps make the next version easier for gramma.
You also don't want gramma to be able to turn off updates, because she will. Updates on my machine? They were set to download and notify - never install, by default. But no, you don't get that on the gramma home version.
Do you ever get into a cessna and complain they don't have room for all the 40 members of your group? That's not a valid complaint. That's a bad choice of right tool for the job.
The OS is big because the 787 is big. And I say all that, as someone who hates MS and Windows with a deep, long, hard, smelly brown passion.
Edit: I remember a few places still running 3.11 well into the 00s because it just worked for the given tasks, got out of the way and didn't require a super-computer to run. The performance difference was especially jarring when Vista came out and barely worked on contemporary hardware.