Back in 1980s and 90s I had MS Quick C 1.0 and Borland Turbo Pascal 3.0-5.5. On my 386 system back in early 90s, these used to be super fast with most of the small hobby programs I wrote then. Type program name on MS dos command prompt, press enter and you can start coding or editing your file in WP or 123 in the blink of an eye. Press key combo to run program in debug mode and it would be ready in less than 1 second.
That system did run Windows 3.0, and later on 3.1 & Windows 95, but for a lot of tasks I would just use MSDOS and be done with that. Even running character mode Linux with pre 1.0 kernel in multiuser mode was fairly snappy in those days.
The first generation unibody macbook pros running OSX felt fairly fast and snappy back in the day, but even that was no match to the peak MSDOS speed. And I suppose that snappiness was felt mostly because Windows XP while fast, was not the snappiest OS out there.
In 2021 with every component seemingly 100x faster than those systems, with a 8 core i9 CPU on my MBP 16, I dont see any environment being that fast. I really miss peak MSDOS experience from the days of Windows 3.0 era.