Just go 9 years back actually. Computers were 20x slower 9 years ago according to Moore's law

Moore's law doesn't say anything about the growth rate of performance vs time.

Software wasn't bug-free, but it was responsive.

Not all of it was, some of it was very laggy and slow. Indeed the whole OS would frequently freeze up.

Sure, but nowadays all of it is laggy and slow. I cringe every time I'm faster than Slack, a text chat program.

Yep exactly. If we're talking about a cutting-edge app, I get the sluggishness.

But IRC used to respond instantly. Feels like apps are doing roughly the same thing but more slowly despite having computers that are orders of magnitude faster.

Be careful not to mix slow CPUs with not having SSDs. A OS freezing up is almost always because something is broken or because it's waiting for a HDD to spin up.

That's why I use vim!

Windows 3.1 was based on async programming, and wasn't responsive every now and then.

Wasn't Windows 3.1 or 95 also the one where things looked like they were going faster if you jiggled the mouse?

Yes it was Windows 95, probably the original release, as a lot of things were improved in OSR2: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/294907-why-moving-the-...

It may seem responsive if you run old software on modern hardware.

It was always slow on contemporary hardware. On affordable PCs Win 3.1 was so slow you could see it redrawing windows and menus. Win 95 was so resource hungry, people wrote songs about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOwQKWiRJAA). XP seemed fast only at the end of its very long life, due to Longhorn project failing and delaying its famously shitty successor.

It wasn't just Windows. Classic MacOS for most of its life could not drag windows with their contents in real time. Mac OS X was a slideshow before 10.4, and Macs kept frequently beachballing until they got SSDs.

> Classic MacOS for most of its life could not drag windows with their contents in real time

There was shareware you could install which would do it though! Even on a 25 MHz 68030 it was surprisingly usable (more usable than the passive matrix LCD at least) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cQo29SIIgU

It got a bit slower in color on an external display https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peWIysrf7DY

That wasn't a hardware limitation. BeOS was outperforming Windows and Mac on the same hardware. If JLG hadn't demanded too much money, Apple would have merged with BeOS (and probably be a distant memory by now but that's a separate issue)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjriSNgFHsM&t=350s

Like when you were booting windows and waiting an extra 3 minutes for your single processor CPU to finish all the startup tasks before doing anything else?