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

It blows my mind how unresponsive modern tech is, and it frustrates me constantly. What makes it even worse is how unpredictable the lags are so you can't even train yourself around it.

I was watching Halt and Catch Fire and in the first season the engineering team makes a great effort to meet something called the "Doherty Threshold" to keep the responsiveness of the machine so the user doesn't get frustrated and lose interest. I guess that is lost to time!

This is what happens when you have a leaning tower of abstractions, with each layer being developed with a philosophy of, "it's good enough". Some performance loss is unavoidable when you're adding layers, but that aforementioned attitude of indifference has a multiplicative effect which dramatically increases losses. By the time you get to the endpoint, the losses snowball into something rather ridiculous.