[imran0]

> I always see people remark "wow look how snappy old computers were" when they're essentially built like $10,000 machines if you were to actually have those specs at that time.

But the question is that, if you were to spend $10,000 or more today will you experience the same snappiness.

I would argue that it's impossible to replicate the low-latency experience of "retro" systems today with the overhead of modern software; no matter how much you are willing to spend.

[vel0city]

Without a doubt in my mind. For fun I do use retro computers to mess around, often on original spinning rust drives while they still live so I do it side by side.

I've been messing around with some PIII laptops with integrated Intel IGPs running Windows 2000, 256MB RAM, old IDE drives. Loads of applications takes 10+ seconds to launch.

Applying effects on many photo editors is crazy slow. Editing photos taken on my camera today is an exercise in patience. It's even slow just panning around.

It can't even playback most of the videos I'll normally watch, even if you do load something like VLC. Not that it really matters, because it can't even draw a 1920x1080 image.

Doing an IMAP sync with even the crappy crypto it can do takes like a minute. You can see it drawing the graphics in the emails line by line. It takes a moment to switch emails. Replying to an email takes a few seconds for the new email window to appear, you can see it drawing the UI while it loads.

Don't get me wrong, sure maybe in notepad.exe there's a few extra nanoseconds between keystrokes. But my machine today (way less than $10k) doesn't really have any lag for the software I run for text anyways.

[vkaku]

Next time, complain that your DOS 6.0 can't run Notepad :-) Maybe you paid a fortune for that system back in the 80s.

If I were on DOS, I'd be happy running Borland C++ with 1-2MB of RAM. Even though Ahem 640k ought to be enough for everybody. The lesser the bloat, the better.