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Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

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752 points dceddia | 1 comments | 23 Jun 23 14:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | source
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Joeri ◴[23 Jun 23 15:57 UTC] No.36448665[source]▶
600 mhz is quite the machine for NT. I remember running NT4 on a 233 mhz pentium II with 128 MB RAM and everything felt instant and limitless.

Windows 2000 was quite the hog compared to NT4 and all it added that I had a use for was USB support. I think by that point Dave Cutler was no longer running the show and windows performance slowly started degrading.

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1. masswerk ◴[23 Jun 23 16:16 UTC] No.36448927[source]▶
I think, the most important factor isn't so much the CPU, but loading binaries from disk. And that (I/O) improved quite massively over the 1990s. (And anything written for spinning disks will start nearly instantly using solid state storage.)

To illustrate the CPU/disk-access ratio: There's a reason for scripting languages becoming prevalent for web backends in the 1990s. Loading a script source from disk and precompiling it on the fly was still faster than loading a much bigger binary from disk – which had to be done on each CGI request. (E.g., with Perl, you could have your normal script, but you could also produce an executable binary from a core. But nobody did the latter for the exact reason.)