Comment by HappMacDonald
3 days ago
You can always install DOS as your daily driver and run 1980's software on any hardware from the past decade, and then tell me how that's slow.
1000x referred to the hardware capability, and that's not a rarity that is here.
The trouble is how software has since wasted a majority of that performance improvement.
Some of it has been quality of life improvements, leading nobody to want to use 1980s software or OS when newer versions are available.
But the lion's share of the performance benefit got chucked into the bin with poor design decisions, layers of abstractions, too many resources managed by too many different teams that never communicate making any software task have to knit together a zillion incompatible APIs, etc.
The sad thing is that even running DOS software in DOSBox (or in QEMU+FreeDOS), or Amiga software in UAE, is much faster than any native software I have run in many years on any modern systems. They also use more reasonable amounts of storage/RAM.
Animations is part of it of course. A lot of old software just updates the screen immediately, like in a single frame, instead of adding frustrating artificial delays to every interaction. Disabling animations in Android (an accessibility setting) makes it feel a lot faster for instance, but it does not magically fix all apps unfortunately.
> The trouble is how software has since wasted a majority of that performance improvement.
It has been sacrificed in the name of developer productivity, since hardware is cheap compared to the cost of writing efficient software outside of performance critical situations. The result is that the world is drowning in inefficient software.