What changed?
Modern Windows still requires language packs, but you can apparently switch your primary language without a reinstall.
Adobe products still corrupt already-correct Arabic text unless you have the correct edition or add-on or something.
It was indeed annoying to transfer files at least until the Internet and flash drives were widely available, but that’s been more than 20 years.
Look what was achieved despite those limits. We've basically had the same desktop and productivity software for 30 years. Look at games like Doom or Tyrian, or what was happening on consoles and think about how crappy that hardware was.
Modern software is embarrassingly slow by comparison. I've been around long enough to know that's always been the way. Newer software drives new hardware sales and we're on yesteryear's supercomputers but why?
I agree with the rest, but games are a comparatively bad example, almost a counterexample. A lot of them are basically the exception of what you're saying. Because the visual fidelity of games has overall steadily improved since the inception of computer games, with some astonishing milestones along the way.
So games are a category of software that did (and continues to do) make efficient use of ever-improving computer hardware. Not all of them, not in every aspect, but the overall progress is obvious.
Office software on the other hand...
Again, I agree that gaming has come further, but I actually think the comparison works well because gaming is reaching that Windows 2k/XP plateau. We're waist-deep into diminishing returns now. Cyberpunk is the Windows Vista of gamedev. Gosh it's pretty at times but at an almighty cost, we're shovelling gold into our PCs to make generic compute modules work out how light interacts with virtual surfaces. Doesn't sound like gaming to me.
The software continues to get flabbier, demands more and more, and we have to keep up of we can't load Office in under 10 seconds, or play games at the native resolutions. It just feels wasteful.
That's true, but I think the idea was more that other software has not only been mostly stagnant (that, too), but often actually regressing in performance. Games on the other hand have been steadily improving. Maybe not keeping up the full pace, as the mathematical and hardware tricks became unnecessary and were traded in for ease of development, but game developers at least overall did make use of the better hardware. They stopped doing the super clever stuff when it was just not necessary anymore while still providing better fidelity.
> Doesn't sound like gaming to me.
Eh, it's part of it. And it's not like other aspects did not profit from the better hardware as well. Later Civilization titles are pretty compute-intensive between turns, for more complex gameplay. Earlier chess programs had to "think" a very long time for not that great chess performance...
why?
> I also remember when moderately long text had to be split across files (even multiple floppies if you were writing a book).
2MB is 2 million bytes, The average book is something like 0.5
> I remember having to choose what languages my OS installation was going to be able to display.
This is a bad thing?
> Farther back I remember not having the spare cash for...
lol, irrelevant!
> Our current generation of PCs is probably within a factor of two of the minimum spec necessary for robust machine translation and natural language interfaces.
I have no idea what you just said. People for the most part read/write text and watch videos. This would work much better if we eliminated compute entirely.
> I enjoy using the old hardware but it really doesn't do most of the jobs we have now.
imho the way to look at old hardware is to look at only the good features we've lost. For example, I cant think of anything I want from a c64 except from sprite collision and having menu entries starting with function keys [F1] because that worked so insanely fast compared to a mouse. The rest was just coping with the state of the art.
1.44MB was the effective capacity of floppies until they died out. There was stuff like VGACopy that could format them with higher capacity (since floppy controller access was fairly low level), but it was an uncommon thing among tinkerers, the disks themselves were not marketed for more than 1.44MB, and I doubt they were tested above their nominal capacity (and even at that they were not exactly known as super reliably).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Sholes-G...
What a marvel of engineering. All I got is plastic boxes. Thinking about it I'm not sure if having the next paragraph written by a different person is actually a good idea. Organizing your notes into a book undisturbed by better men is sure to impress a lot more. I would hope the final draft of my book about antique hardware wouldn't quote someone who remembers the bad parts better than the good.
Obviously, things that move boatloads of bits (mostly media) have well benefited from the vast amounts of RAM and incredible bandwidth of modern machines. And, of course, video games, which will always push limits.
But outside of that, word processing, data collecting, "printing checks from AP", those peaked a long time ago. And, of course, I appreciate how businesses collect vast amounts of data today (because they can, because storage is free), but core business functions, transaction processing, that's pretty well plateaued as well.
Today all of this stuff is pretty well resolved, but at a cost. Easy sharing and interactive collaboration over network is built on protocols like TLS that would be very slow even on the Quadra. The networks that runs over use an amount of compute that rivals supercomputers of the 90s (for one example just look at channel correction in MIMO radios). The disk footprint of all the fonts, languages, etc, is mitigated by storing them server-side, but this is all usable due to how fast networks are now. Machine translation means you can work across a language divide. Dictation is a win for accessibility and avoiding RSI. All of this is available on a Chromebook or iPad that is more reliable than the Quadra, runs on a battery, and is 50x cheaper.
We're not done, just as today spell check and grammar check are widely accepted as table stakes in another ten years features like built-in writing coach, editing, and research assistant features will likely be considered basic requirements with all the hardware needed to support that.
And that's just word processing.
Discovering Termux and having a large suite of Linux terminal-based tools available resolved that and many, many, many more frustrations.