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!

Even worse is the new trend of web pages optimizing for page load time. You wind up with a page that loads "instantly" but has almost none of the data you need displayed. Instead there are 2 or 3 AJAX requests to load the data & populate the DOM. Each one results in a repaint, wasting CPU and causing the page content to move around.

This drives me crazy, especially because it breaks finding within a page. Eg. if you order food and you already know what you want.

Old days: Cmd + f, type what you want.

New days: first scroll to the end of the page so that all the contents are actually loaded. Cmd + f, type what you want.

Is just a list of dishes, some with small thumbnails, some without any images at all. If you can't load a page with 30 dishes fast enough, you have a serious problem (you could always lazily load the thumbnails if you want to cheat).

Well, the tech stack is insane: Some virtual machine running a web browser process running a virtual machine for a html renderer which consumes a document declaration language incorporating a scripting language to overcome the document limitations trying to build interactive programs.

Actually much worse as Microsoft once did with their COM model, ActiveX based on MFC foundation classes with C++ templates, etc.

And to build those interactive programs somebody is trained to use React, Vue, etc. using their own eco systems of tools. This is operated by a stack of build tools, a stack of distribution tools, kubernetes for hosting and AWS for managing that whole damn thing.

Oh - and do not talk even about Dependency Management, Monitoring, Microservices, Authorization and so on...

But I really wonder - what would be more complex?

Building interactive programs based on HTML or Logo (if anybody does remember)?

Virtual machines don't add much overhead.

That may be so, although a VM on AWS is measurably slower than the same program running on my Xeon from 2013 or so.

But, more generally, the problem is that tech stacks are an awful amalgamation of uncountable pieces which, taken by themselves, "don't add much overhead". But when you add them all together, you end up with a terribly laggy affair; see the other commenter's description of a web page with 30 dishes taking forever to load.

My experience has been that HTML and making changes to HTML has huge amounts of overhead all by itself.

I don't dispute that very bad javascript can cause problems, but I don't think it's the virtualization layers or the specific language that are responsible for more than a sliver of that in the vast majority of use cases.

And the pile of build and distribution tools shouldn't hurt the user at all.

It's exactly the pile of layers, not "bad javascript" or any other single thing. Yes vms do add ridiculius overhead.