MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

I completely understand why things are going the way they are as our computing environment has become ever more hostile. But I am very nostalgic for the time where I would power up a Vic-20 and within seconds be able to get to work.

Teaching my daughter to program on a modern computer, we spend more time bootstrapping and in process, than we do in actual development.

That computers are just slower to interact with now is such a truism that we hardly remark upon it any more. It seems utterly insane that in the early 90's I could just run Windows 3.1 on a bit of kit that in all likelihood wouldn't even power a toaster today, and the experience was, well, frictionless. I don't recall ever thinking "wtf is this thing doing?", whereas today, by contrast, if I have the audacity to be afk for long enough for my Windows 10 box to go sleep I know I am in for an infuriating waste of minutes' worth of disk thrashing before the bloody thing even deigns to reacknowledge my existence.

I recall windows 95/98 being pretty slow to boot. I also recall being warned by teachers not to move the mouse while things were booting as that would allegedly slow things down further. These days the only real time I wonder "wtf is this thing doing" is when I'm waiting about 5-10 seconds for my mac to wake up from sleep.

Win 95 and its descendants had legendary poor boot times.

Things finally improved with XP, but W3.1x and W95 were anything but fast - unless you were playing Solitaire.