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

(twitter.com)
752 points dceddia | 1 comments | 23 Jun 23 14:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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mydriasis ◴[23 Jun 23 14:49 UTC] No.36447570[source]▶
Not gonna lie, my memory serves me well. I remember using Windows 98 on an old PC, and it was hot garbage. It took generations to boot up, and applications took generations to open. My story is anecdata, but so it this twitter post. These days I have an infinitely snappy experience with desktop linux on an SSD.
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mike_hearn ◴[23 Jun 23 17:48 UTC] No.36450087[source]▶
A good way to reality check this is to think about how frequently we saw loading splash screens then vs now. Back then it was common. Office suites, IDEs, browsers, pretty much any non-trivial app would show you a splash screen whilst it loaded. Some even had progress bars in the splash screens. Nowadays even web apps don't have splashes (though you could argue that grey loading flashers are the modern equivalent).
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bink ◴[23 Jun 23 18:08 UTC] No.36450316[source]▶
Many of those apps switched from using splash screens to pre-loading in the background.
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mike_hearn ◴[23 Jun 23 18:17 UTC] No.36450414[source]▶
Which ones?
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1. pixl97 ◴[24 Jun 23 04:02 UTC] No.36455420[source]▶
I'd say it's not so big these days after SSD became the norm, but a lot of apps there for awhile would set a start up program in the system tray. That would preload most of the dlls in memory so when you ran the executable it loaded much faster.

Adobe, for example, has a ton of common libraries that load at startup.