Start Me Up

I've decided that the next time I get a new PC, I'm going to erase whatever version of Windows it comes with, and put on Windows 95.  Yes, I do still have the CD.  I believe I also have a copy of OS/2, but it's on 25 floppies.  I'm also going to put on an old version of Microsoft Office from that era.  That is, if I can't find an old copy of WordPerfect with the white text on a plain blue screen.

Why would I be putting obsolete software on a brand new computer?  Because I want to know what it's like to have a really fast computer.  Yes, all computers seem fast at first.  But that quickly changes: your computer gets slower and slower, until routine actions leave you staring into space while you wait for the machine to catch up.  I figure that the only way to make a computer stay fast in the long term is to run software from the days when computers were a hundred times slower.

Why do computers get slow?  It's a lot of things.

First, there's psychology: your shiny new computer seems fast at first, but once it's lost that new-CPU smell, you start to notice that it takes thirty seconds of hard-drive thrashing just to open the web browser.

And there's the sheer amount of software: as you install more and more stuff, there's more going on in the background.  Even when you're not using an application, it could be checking for updates or something in the background.

And of course, the faster computers get, the more the programmers take that speed for granted.  On early computers, programs were simple but computing power was at a premium, so the programmers could afford to go through their code in detail on a quest for efficiency.  With more power and bigger, more complex applications, that won't happen.

So I wonder if computers have really gotten faster.  It would be interesting to see computers of various eras compared in their time needed to, say, open a word processor document.  Certainly, my tablet opening a Google Drive document would be one of the slower competitors.