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!

OTOH I recall alt-tabbing full screen games (Warcraft 3 on a single core machine is a specific memory) and then sitting back for a while…

Office suites have never been good, but office suites in like 2005 seemed to stretch systems to the breaking point.

Lots of consumer software has always sucked out of the box, I guess if you are here you were possibly a technically savvy kid at some point, is it possible that you were just more selective about the types of programs you ran when you were using the computer for fun?

Most games don't need to change screen resolutions anymore which is the expensive bit since not only do you have to wait for the hardware to settle, you have to throw out basically everything in GPU memory and reset it all