But it didn’t do much? This was an OS where plugging in a USB device required a reboot. Where connecting to the Internet required running winsock. Where most of the software had hard 16bit limits like the max size of file notepad could open being 32k and excel having 65535 rows.
It wasn’t efficient it was limited.
It was an offline OS for an offline era. It ran trusted software (everything it ran was something the user had explicitly installed) so it didn’t need to work to protect the user from malicious code. It wasn’t encrypting everything it wrote tot he hard drive or all its network traffic (if it was even handling network traffic). It didn’t support Unicode or vector typeface rendering and realtime video rendering at more than 300x200 pixels.
> This was an OS where plugging in a USB device required a reboot. Where connecting to the Internet required running winsock. Where most of the software had hard 16bit limits like the max size of file notepad could open being 32k and excel having 65535 rows.
Then just jump ahead to WinXP. It too flies if you put it on an SSD, and has solved all of your problems. It ran fine on a Pentium III (MS's minimum req is a Pentium 233, a Pentium III is more than twice as fast).
Now we have computers that are over 300 times faster than that, but yet we're still stuck baseline stuff like 'how make ui not be slow'.
You can’t just move the goalposts like that. OP claimed win9x was ‘peak windows’. If you concede it wasn’t great but then want to say WinXP was ‘peak windows’ (good luck making that claim stick with anyone who remembers it) you’re making a different claim.
The goalpost to me is 'An OS doesn't need to doesn't feel like shit on reasonable hardware'. Windows 95 does that with flying colours. So does XP. The only reason they ever felt slow was because they were on mechanical drives. If everything you had open was in RAM and you didn't need to swap to disk, they both worked great. Now there are SSDs, so that problem went away, but modern Windows and many common programs managed make that problem come back despite SSDs and modern processor being lightning fast. And it's not like doing that is impossible. There are modern programs that manage to make good use of the hardware.
There's not much I can see that prevents us from having both a UI that doesn't feel like shit and is featureful. Linux isn't too far off in many cases. The whole idea that modern Windows is slow because it's packed with features is one I reject.
It wasn’t efficient it was limited.
It was an offline OS for an offline era. It ran trusted software (everything it ran was something the user had explicitly installed) so it didn’t need to work to protect the user from malicious code. It wasn’t encrypting everything it wrote tot he hard drive or all its network traffic (if it was even handling network traffic). It didn’t support Unicode or vector typeface rendering and realtime video rendering at more than 300x200 pixels.
Computers are doing so much more nowadays.