Back in the day, you flicked your computer's on switch, and it turned on. (And then it took ten minutes or so to load software from the tape drive – much faster from floppy, but still far from instant.) Now, our processors and storage devices are millions of times faster, and computers can take minutes just to start. Software needs to load itself into memory, then initialise the initialisation routines, then actually initialise, then you have to wait for the data to populate, then it's still slow until the cache has warmed up.
It's 2022 and if I want to play a rhythm game, I have to calibrate my input device because, since the days of PS/2, keyboard latency has gone up so much that I can hear the delay between the button click and the computer's reaction.
It's 2022, and when I draw something on one device, it takes several seconds for the drawing to make its way to the other, even if they're in the same room, because the data's being sent through four layers of format conversion in JavaScript, and the traffic's being sent half-way 'round the world.
It's 2022, and "blazing fast" means "slower, and probably more buggy, than Windows 95".
Low latency is still available. Get a fast gaming keyboard/mouse/monitor/NVMe SSD. Use a latency-tuned kernel, e.g. with full preemption enabled. Disable swap and run a userspace OOM killer to avoid the problems this would otherwise cause. Run Xorg with compositing disabled and TearFree disabled. Disable vsync everywhere. Don't use software that caps the framerate low (e.g. terminals using libvte[0]). Turn off all UI animations.
Most software I use feels more responsive than anything from the Windows 95 era.
With all of the extra power we have in our components these days, companies feel like they need to utilize all of it, otherwise it's wasted. Thus the suite of horrible programs required to get a USB controller to have deadzones, or for keyboards to have custom functions.
The amount of background processes in one Windows 10 instance without having opened a single program manually is mind-boggling.
My biggest gripe lately is being forced to move more and more of my daily work off of a very fast and beefy local workstation to an AWS Workspace that feels like I'm time traveling backwards 20 years to a laggy remote desktop connection.
You must have used a different Win95 than I did. Slow and buggy in nearly everything. Had you said Win2000 or XP, I might have agreed more, except that they were really slow. My windows laptop boots up in about 5-10 seconds, and it is rare that something crashes on it.
No, I'm aware how buggy Windows 95 was. I used Windows 98 SE, which was still slow, and would occasionally just get stuck in an uninterruptible "non-fatal" BSOD, hang, BSOD loop before deciding that actually, it is a fatal error after all. From its reputation, I imagine Windows 95 was worse in both respects. I am comparing modern computers to this. Rose-tinted glasses my foot: I am pointing at a computer that would assume the delete key was held (for no identifiable reason) at boot,¹ and I am saying it's more predictable, less buggy, and faster than modern computers.
It took under three minutes to cold boot (~5 seconds from hibernation), took less than a second to load a static HTML page from the 2GB hard drive, and could play tanks.swf[0] for hours without spinning up the fan.
Compare that to modernity: your average Windows 10 machine will normally refuse to cold boot in favour of "fast startup" (basically hibernation) because it takes so long to start normally. If you try that anytime, good luck getting to "I can type with less than a second's lag between a keypress and the character appearing on the screen" in less than ten minutes. If you have an SSD, 16GB of RAM and an octacore processor, you might be able to get that down to 3 minutes – juuuust about edging out the "wait for it to boot, double-click on a document, and wait two seconds for Wordpad to open" of 1999 laptop hardware and software. (And if you give those resources² to Windows 98 it'll boot the whole OS and have your file open in less time than it takes Microsoft Teams to hide its splash screen.)
In a modern web browser, it usually takes less than a second to load a static HTML page. But sometimes it just takes upwards of 10 seconds, sitting there and spinning on a blank page with a blank address bar and (aside from the fan noise) no apparent sign of life.
And… well, good luck with tanks.swf these days; without active cooling, you can feel the temperature difference through the case. My laptop³ went up over 10°C with the fan. A simple Flash game where the majority of the gameplay is stationary graphics idles at half a core, averages one-and-a half cores and peaks at ~2.8 cores (70% CPU utilisation).
I think it's fair to say that computers have got worse.
¹: Yes, it would beep incessantly during the DOS phase of the boot sequence (BIOS beep, then a pause, then a faster, higher-pitched beep I can only assume came from WIN.COM), then proceed to try to delete all the files on the desktop once the desktop loaded. If you timed it right, though, you could tap the delete key before the first beep, and save yourself the hassle of waiting for the keyboard buffer to drain.
²: Minus the RAM, of course; that's enough to overflow its 32-bit address size and make its memory allocator think there's no RAM.
Back in the day, you flicked your computer's on switch, and it turned on. (And then it took ten minutes or so to load software from the tape drive – much faster from floppy, but still far from instant.) Now, our processors and storage devices are millions of times faster, and computers can take minutes just to start. Software needs to load itself into memory, then initialise the initialisation routines, then actually initialise, then you have to wait for the data to populate, then it's still slow until the cache has warmed up.
It's 2022 and if I want to play a rhythm game, I have to calibrate my input device because, since the days of PS/2, keyboard latency has gone up so much that I can hear the delay between the button click and the computer's reaction.
It's 2022, and when I draw something on one device, it takes several seconds for the drawing to make its way to the other, even if they're in the same room, because the data's being sent through four layers of format conversion in JavaScript, and the traffic's being sent half-way 'round the world.
It's 2022, and "blazing fast" means "slower, and probably more buggy, than Windows 95".