Only as a corollary, to put things in perspective, in the early '90's that was Windows 3.x on a 33-66-100 Mhz CPU with 4, maybe 8 MB (yes megabytes) of RAM and programs had a splash screen to mask the fact that they were very slow loading.
With at least 20x processor speed, double the bits, and 1000x memory (let alone SSD's) I would have expected something better than what we have.
exactly correct. The question is not: "was software bloated in the 90s". It's: "given that hardware capability increased in by several orders of magnitude, did software quality/speed see a similar increase?" The answer is a resounding no. It would be like moving from a tricycle to a supersonic car and somehow taking longer to get from point a to point b.
I'll concede that we're not going supersonic, but our speed is maybe more at 100mph than slower. Computers (including phones, accomplishing the same tasks that desktops were) are absolutely faster than they were.
We also have better UX, more functionality, and better quality.
If people want to run the software of the mid-90s on modern hardware, I'm sure they can figure out a way. The upside is that when it crashes or you have to switch back and forth with modern software with greater functionality, the underlying system will let you do that very quickly.
I dunno, we have ridiculously amazing displays, live video, amazing audio, intuitive, reactive interfaces, and profound knowledge at our fingertips. Seems like we're doing pretty good!
Really? Do you think modern user interfaces are great? Everybody implements their widgets from scratch using html, css and Javascript. The boring old ui toolkits standardized a lot of features that are today non existent or different everywhere. For example a plain old list widget where you could select multiple items had standard ways to select ranges, to add ranges to a selection, to toggle the selection of single items, to select all of them. Most modern software doesn't have those actions. And even if it has some of them you have to find out how. Whereas such things used to be commonplace. Regularity of boring features is actually intuitive. Nice looking is not intuitive.
With at least 20x processor speed, double the bits, and 1000x memory (let alone SSD's) I would have expected something better than what we have.