

The author claims that by relying so heavily on these modern, more resource intensive programming environments, we're losing "something significant". In order to realise what that significant something is, the author poses the following challenge to his readers:

I challenge everybody out there to dig up an old copy of Windows 95 or Windows 98, and install it on your machine and note how much faster that user interface operates than the modern ones today. I also advise grabbing some older software written in the late 1990s for those operating systems and see just how fast they are today on modern equipment.

There are a few interesting elements to this challenge. What the author is neglecting to mention is the fact that the operating systems of those days (like Windows 95 and 98) might feel a lot faster on today's systems - but let's face it, they do a lot less too. Today, people have higher expectations of the basic functionality that an operating system should provide than they had ten years ago. Today, people expect the operating system to include photo management tools, music management applications, security applications, multi-user capabilities; Windows 95 did not have these things (initially) and Windows 98 only a few.

In addition, I am not exactly sure myself if I would mention the Windows 9x line as examples of proper coding techniques. The Windows 9x line was still a shell running on top of MS-DOS, and it was very prone to crashes and kernel panics (blue screens). Whether this had something to do with lack of quality code or simply a bad design is irrelevant - proper design is as much a part of programming as the actual implementation of said design.

Now, that does not mean the author does not have a point. As most of you will already know, running older operating systems can be a very stimulating experience, and many of us will have longings for the days of yore when operating systems seemed better coded and leaner, slimmer, and faster - I know I do whenever I boot into BeOS. Sadly, that moment of longing is soon shattered whenever I, yet again, run into some limitation that forces me to boot into XP or Linux, or to get my PowerBook.

Appealing to the human tendency of glorifying the past is relatively easy. However, I can't help but wonder: if BeOS (or the Amiga, or whatever) had been allowed to continue its development, reaching feature parity with the likes of XP/Vista and Mac OS X - would it still be as lean, slim, and fast like we remember it now?

I doubt it.

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