I'm talking about general UI responsiveness. Perhaps this is just nostalgia.

There's some truth to it just for vendor-supported graphics driver reasons alone.

Watching 90's GUI programs is always fun because you can see the graphics as they are drawn, which I don't seem to remember from back then.

If you're nostalgic for that, there's plenty of modern software with a watch-it-paint-itself UI. <coughSagecough>

I have never heard anyone call Sage "modern software" before : - )

Now we have spinners that twirl while we wait for graphics to transmit from another continent.

And GUIs which redraw the whole screen when the cursor blinks. /s

It is. Windows UIs didn't get Amiga levels of responsive until Windows 98SE or so.

And then lost them again during the gap between Vista's launch and SSDs becoming ubiquitous...

I had some of the first SLC SSDs. It didn't help at all. Windows 7 was a massive improvement though.

I have a SSD on my work machine. Win 10 is still slow.

Haha I had the exact same thought. I still hear that “brrbrbrrrbrre” of the HDD arm frantically trying to deal with the overload of doing anything whatsoever.

I do miss the sounds of older, more mechanical machines though. You could be doing something else in the room while your Very Long Task was running, waiting for the silence that signaled it finishing.

I don't recall it being snappy and I also recall it being crashy. But it was a lot better than what came before it. Given the hibernation Apple was in at the time, it was the best alternative. Between the 95 launch and OS X 10.3 was the only time I used Windows as my daily driver.

> Given the hibernation Apple was in at the time,

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.

it was a lot worse than the sgi workstations i was using in 01994

also, than the bsdi bsd/os workstations in the same room with them, and those were the same hardware win95 ran on

Fast on a Pentium 75, dreadfully slow on 486/25

The IO at the time was terrible, also because,if memory serves me right, plenty of disks/controllers didn't support DMA transfers.

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.

486 was certainly not snappy, though Win95 did technically run even on a 386 with 4MB of RAM (i know because i tried it back when Win95 was new).

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.

I find it hard to believe disk was snappy compared to modern devices, since original comment mentioned IO. Cpu/memory are down to program behavior in addition to hw. Disk, more size and hw. And HW improvements have dwarfed size increases (rather, facilitating them to some degree).

There was plenty of software and games that could fit on a floppy or two.

Depends on what sort of disk I/O you have in mind. Floppy disks were never snappy, but HDD disks were fine for the most part until the OS started using them for virtual memory. Keep in mind that things were much smaller these days - i remember thinking that my 2GB HDD would never fill up :-P.

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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti3LQHXZ0Qg

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfh5ZcDhdZA