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.

@thomasfuchs

If I remember correctly, 95 had grammar checking as you write (but the grammar checker was, and remains, terrible). I can't remember new features after that which were particularly useful.

2000 introduced the ability to click anywhere and fill in whitespace, which made people use styles less and generally made output worse.

EDIT: I had a look at Wikipedia's list of new features in Office 2000 and, of those, the only thing that looks like I'd care about it is the new vector and raster graphics program. Which seems to no longer be part of Office.

@david_chisnall @thomasfuchs The amount of new [useful] features in MS Word over time, graphed against the memory size/system demand of the program, would be illuminating. I can't think easily of anything new in word processing that has excited me since we moved from markup based systems like Wordstar to WYSIWYG editors like Word.

@bencourtice @thomasfuchs

Spell checking as you type was definitely limited by CPU and RAM. I think Word 2 kept the dictionary on disk and read individual parts on demand.

The main RAM thing was being able to include images. I remember doing a school report with two scanned photos in ClarisWorks (for Windows) 1 on a 386 with 5 MiB of RAM, and I had to write the text first and then do the layout because it started swapping with both images in the page and would freeze a bit.

There were other things in ClarisWorks 1 that I still miss. A text box in their drawing program had full access to all of the word processor's functionality. A table in either the drawing program or word processor was a spreadsheet, so you could do things like having a total at the bottom row of a table without having to do the calculation externally.