But still, during the time of Windows 95/98 I could hardly play even a 128kbps MP3 with WinAmp in my Pentium 133MHz with 12MB of Ram where I had got rid of lots of bloatware. At the same time I could play it smoothly in Linux with a full blown desktop environment (Window Maker) running. So it was a bad performer in comparison even back then.
I call bullshit. Windows 95/98/2000 did not have any bloatware....
I call bullshit on your call. Don’t you remember active desktop? That was as bloated as anything and crashed all the time. People having a IE crash screen as their wallpaper and being clueless as to how to get rid of it, was hilarious.
The thing that always strikes me with these kinds of demos is how absurdly efficient old OSs were / had to be. It's obviously not an apples to apples comparison, as modern operating systems have to handle a lot more, but even Windows XP (which handled a lot of the same basic Internet browsing tasks as I still use now!) is almost comically fast on modern hardware.
It's a fair comparison IMO. There are Linux flavours still making my 15 year old hardware faster with every other update. And any standard flavor still works like a charm. There is no real reason OSes get more shitty with every version
Even standard Ubuntu runs very smooth on old hardware (if it has enough memory and a ssd). I installed windows 10 on my 15 year old think pad, it was usable, but quite slow. Switched to Ubuntu and everything felt snappy again.
If only it had a proper UNIX subsystem, instead of something to make DoD happy. That was Microsoft's biggest mistake regarding GNU/Linux adoption. I only cared about Slackware in 1995, because Windows NT POSIX wasn't enough for university work.
Windows Server 2003 with Interix was my daily driver for a few years. That was my "peak Windows" moment. It had a fast UI, could run software meant for XP, and I could compile a ton of POSIX-targeted software.
But still, during the time of Windows 95/98 I could hardly play even a 128kbps MP3 with WinAmp in my Pentium 133MHz with 12MB of Ram where I had got rid of lots of bloatware. At the same time I could play it smoothly in Linux with a full blown desktop environment (Window Maker) running. So it was a bad performer in comparison even back then.
Let's not exaggerate: Winamp .mp3 playback was just fine on any Pentium running Windows 9x - though I concede that even my Pentium 75 had 16 MB RAM and I have never seen a Pentium with less than that. On the other hand, extracting a CD and compressing it's .wav to .mp3 was a whole day of computing, and sending the files as attachments through SMTP was enough to elicit flowery vehement objections from my university's…
The first mp3 I ever played was Jun Kazama's theme from Tekken 2 on a Windows 95 box (Pentium 60) using Fraunhofer's own graphical mp3 player. I had to close all other open applications and not move the mouse around too much, lest the playback start to "crackle". This would've been about 1996, just a few scant months after Damaged Cybernetics, the famed emulation group, announced on their home page: "We are investigating the possibilities of using MPEG Layer III compression for music piracy."
Higher resolutions (and the accompanying resource sizes) would be hell for 32-bit OSes though. Also, it’s kind of amazing that many web pages these days are larger than Doom shareware’s zip size.
Not true. Or it's true because of software bloat and resource waste these days. When I was a teenager, I wanted to see what was the maximum resolution my monitor supported. It was a Samsung Syncmaster 14" entirely analog, no OSD, with analog adjustment knobs on the bottom. The video card was a Matrox Millennium II 8MB VRAM and the OS was Windows 3.10. The maximum resolution that I could get was 1600x1200 @ 41Hz inter…
There's a lot more to it than just increasing the resolution. Graphics, animations, font rendering quality, huge images, the list goes on.
Amazingly, opening google.com in the internet explorer browser worked after running the "networking.bat" from the desktop Many other pages don't load, possibly non supported https standards
It made me wonder how hard it would be to get Firefox running inside of there.