My computer boots in about 10 seconds. That's probably about average? In the Windows 95 days that would have seemed almost impossible.

Most applications and games launch in single-digit seconds. I don't recall this being the norm in the Windows 95 days either.

Just the spinning rust turning at 5400rpm seems like that would have been all but impossible. With modern NVMe devices, waiting for data to load isn't really a bottle neck. At 1200MBps+ speeds, we had to span 16 7200rpm drives in RAID-0 to get close to that speed.

With all of that, it does feel wrong to have to wait for apps to load. How much of that is the calling home to validate the app has been signed?

Why not find out by turning off your wifi and starting the app?

But back in those days, you had confidence that the event loop didn't randomly drop things, and you could type ahead of what was on screen with confidence.

That's true, loading times improved drastically with SSDs. The responsiveness isn't just about the loading times though. E.g. if you're typing text some web sites (thankfully not this one) manage to introduce a measurable delay between a key press and when letters appear. Computers in Win95 era were quite slow to be able to do anything complicated on each key press, so usually there was no extra processing and thus no extra delay. Also, few remember, but CRTs weren't limited to 60 Hz, and I remember using e.g. 100 Hz normally (with lower resolution), and the difference was quite noticeable.

If there's just a measurable delay then it's usually tolerable. I _hate_ when the broken JS causing that delay also skips characters if you type too fast, has a setting to wipe the form "on-load" (after you've half filled it out because the site is too slow), or otherwise mangles legitimate text input.