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)?

Ironically these instant starting NT applications were often using COM.

As much as I hated developing with COM, the application interoperability and OLE automation is a form 90s tech utopianism that I miss.

Indeed.

On one project, I actually shifted quite recently from working on old-school, pre-Windows XP, DCOM-based protocols, to interfacing with REST APIs. Let me tell you this: compared to OpenAPI tooling, DCOM is a paradise.

I have no first clue how anyone does anything with OpenAPI. Just about every tool I tried to turn OpenAPI specs into C or C++ code, or documentation, is horribly broken. And this isn't me "holding it wrong" - in each case, I found GitHub issues about those same failures, submitted months or years ago, and still open, on supposedly widely-used and actively maintained projects...