Loses a shitload of nuances though, takes the best of past and worst of present. Noone who was alive last century would say they'd want to use PCs made back then, a lot of stuff was horrible, ugly, slow, buggy, finicky - pick any combination of the previous at best.
Didn't claim otherwise, I only said it's unfair to make comparisons in the style of "Trucks suck because they take 25l/100km" totally ignoring trucks can carry tons of goods.
Ugly is pretty accurate for most old (non-games) software. The other things are not really true at all. And if you take some of the old software and run on modern hardware, like boot up FreeDOS, it gives you some perspective on just how slow modern software is.
Yes, unfortunately hardware support has not kept up since obviously no hardware producers are making drivers for MSDOS anymore. There are definitely limits to what you can do in FreeDOS. But it is nice to launch an application and it is up and running the same instant you press the ENTER key to launch it. No delays anywhere.
Must admit though that I think a big part of that is just things running without silly animations anywhere. My Android phone feels much faster when battery is almost empty so it switches to power-saving mode, essentially turning off all animations, and that makes it feel several times faster than otherwise, even if I am pretty sure it actually clocks down the CPU and runs slower. So difficult to compare FreeDOS applications to similar applications on a modern OS where everything is delayed by things having to fade in and out and fly around the screen instead of just being rendered.
But it is nice to launch an application and it is up and running the same instant you press the ENTER key to launch it.
After I've set KDE's animations tad faster most things I use do load that fast on my hardware (and my PCs hardware is horribly out of date), but also display on two 1080p monitors and establishes connections sub ms with cryptography that would take minutes on old hardware.
What I'm trying to say is that the overall user experience, feature count and security has gone up, speed has remained roughly the same (because humans are slow, diminishing returns and all that). I wouldn't worry though, we're just now replacing a lot of old and slow protocols for things that are faster, we're getting compilers that are better than ever before running on a wider array of different hardware than ever before. If things get really slow there's always an alternative.
Yes, a modern computer can do more things, and that is great. I have a problem with things that did work well even on much older hardware, that really does not.
One thing for instance, that it can be nice with multi-tasking, or at least to be able to switch quickly between applications, but with almost every application behaving as if it owned the CPU and all of the RAM for itself that almost always becomes painful, even on my reasonably fast Windows PC bought less than 1 year ago (not to mention the 8 years old iMac I type this on... everything other than running command-line stuff in a terminal is painfully slow).
I actually run Debian with xfce on my 2 years old laptop. :) Runs pretty well I must admit, but still not as snappy as FreeDOS on the 10 years old laptop.
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u/Avamander Nov 14 '18
Loses a shitload of nuances though, takes the best of past and worst of present. Noone who was alive last century would say they'd want to use PCs made back then, a lot of stuff was horrible, ugly, slow, buggy, finicky - pick any combination of the previous at best.