I miss when computers didn’t incessantly try to extract money from users

@thomasfuchs

Back then:

Computers were getting faster at such a rate that a two-year-old computer felt like it needed replacement.
Core software was gaining features that were actually useful as the underlying computing power increased.
The number of people who didn't have a computer was huge and so the total number of computers being sold was increasing each year.

All of these meant that selling computers or software was basically a money-printing machine. People wanted the newer version and the number of people buying each version grew.

Sadly, the entire industry became addicted to this revenue-growth-without-trying model. And that started to hit a brick wall when a couple of things happened:

First, software became 'good enough' for a bunch of things. I think Office '97 was good enough for probably 90% of home users. The earlier versions were missing features because computers weren't fast enough to be able to handle them. Every new release came with features that people really wanted but couldn't have within the constraints of what was possible to implement. By the late '90s, the hardware was no longer the primary constraint.

Second, hardware stopped getting rapidly faster. My 2013 laptop is slower than my 2023 one. But it's still usable. It runs more or less the same software (the old one is x86-64, the new one AArch64, but I run the same programs). The old one was a quad-core Haswell CPU running at up to 3.5 GHz. The new one has 12 cores (8 fast, 4 slow) and is faster per core. Most workloads have CPU usage sitting at under 10%, so even a 10x speedup wouldn't be noticeable for those, and it's probably closer to 5x for most things that are CPU-limited. Building LLVM on the newer machine is great, it was a bit slow on the older one (but still okay)

In 2003, a 1993 computer would have been painfully slow. A decent 1993 computer would be a 60-66MHz 486 or Pentium. A 2003 machine would have been over 1 GHz and with more instructions per clock, so a factor of 25-50x faster.

Even the gap between the 1993 machine and 1996 expected performance would have been big. The computer I got in 1996 was a 200 MHz Pentium clone with 32 MiB of RAM. A typical 486DX2-66 came with 8 MiB, so the delta from 1993 to 1996 was close to the delta between my 2013 and 2023 machines.

This combination meant that hardware and software refresh slowed down. At the same time, markets became saturated. Bill Gates' goal was 'a computer on every desk'. For most rich countries, that was basically achieved by the early 2000s. Until that point, companies were seeing rapid growth simply by more of the people who could afford computers deciding to buy one. After that, not so much. Some growth continued as the global middle class got bigger, but that grew far more slowly.

EDIT: That 1993 computer, if it ran Office, would have run Word 2.0 or 6.0. 6.0 was the first version to add spell checking as you typed (prior to that, you had to run the spell checker manually and inspect each thing it flagged then explicitly add, ignore or fix it. 6.0 really didn't like to run with less than 8 MiB of RAM (it was laggy and slow if you tried). A 66 MHz 486 and 8 MiB of RAM was fine as long as it was the only program you were running. Start up Paint Shop Pro and open a large image and you're swapping again. My 1996 machine could run Word and an image editor in NT 4 (memory protection, yay!) without swapping. That got a lot better once I bumped the RAM to 64 MiB. By 2003, the idea of having to close a program when I opened another to make sure I had enough RAM had basically gone, I closed programs when I was done with them.

@KarlPettersson @thomasfuchs

Hmm, I don't remember any 486s with 4 MiB of RAM. My 386 came with 4 MiB and 8 MiB was pretty much the standard baseline for 486s (my father's 486 laptop had 8 MiB).

Windows 95's official minimum requirement was 8 MiB, but it was quite painful with under 16 MiB. NT 4 needed 32 to be usable and was amazing with 64 MiB.

@david_chisnall @thomasfuchs Edited the post a bit. At least in Sweden, many 486 computers with 4 MiB RAM were sold around 1994–95: that probably ended with the release of Windows 95.

@david_chisnall @thomasfuchs One may look at IA computer magazines to get an overview of the market at a given time. 4 MiB was perhaps most common in 486 laptops in 1994, but also entry-level desktops could have that configuration. https://archive.org/details/ByteV19N9

@KarlPettersson @thomasfuchs

Hmm, I was skimming, so the first laptop I saw had 8 MiB of RAM but was also advertising enormous battery life. The next system I saw was page 133, which offered the same bundles with 4, 8, 16, and 24 MiB. Typically, when people make listings like that, the cheapest one is there to catch people's attention and the second-cheapest is the one that they expect to sell the most. The next one I found was on page 269 and also had 8 MiB.

My 386 laptop was apparently released in 1991 and had 1 MiB soldered to the board and four SIMM slots that took matched quads, so supported up to 5 MiB total. That was slightly high, most 386s I encountered had 4 MiB. My school computer room was all 386s with 4 MiB (all booting from a floppy and running everything from a file server over Token Ring, which was really slow when 20 machines all tried to launch Windows 3.11 at the same time).