The problem with these comparisons is often that the old OS doesn't actually do the same thing modern software does. Smoothly rendering a GIF/mp4/webm in a chat channel will bring that Windows 98 machine to its knees. Even complex software like web browsers on these older machines do a lot less work. They were also often a lot slower, as load times for modern SSDs are closer to old RAM than to the hard drives at the time.
I can imagine that your particular workload doesn't require all those bells and whistles, and I think it's probably true that only running the bare minimum software like you would back in the day is horrifically inefficient on modern operating systems. But, at the same time, kernels don't crash as often, disks encryption is actually a thing now, file downloads are no longer expressed in kilobits per second and the much prettier screens render much smoother media for a fraction of the performance impact.
Of course there are inefficiencies that could be fixed (like how chat apps are skins around browsers now) but a lot of efficient software from back in the day cost an arm and a leg to build. In the end, the software industry found out that customers are happier to pay when you deliver new features faster than when you deliver new features later (which still run on the old hardware, though the customer may have already replaced said hardware at the time you release your feature).
With current prices for RAM and other system components, I hope companies will once again feel the pressure to build for limited hardware. Then again, when I look at the hardware developers are lugging around, I highly doubt things will change quick enough.
Animated GIF is a format that was designed for playback on late 1980s PCs with a 20 MHz 386 and VGA graphics…
If anything, this example proves the point that we’ve made the simple stuff much too complex. The GIF format hasn’t changed, but somehow getting those indexed color frames to screen on time now requires a GHz core.
About twenty years ago I was generating long animated GIFs. They worked fine in Firefox. In Internet Explorer they started fine but became jankier as playback progressed. I realised that every time IE displayed a frame it was rereading the entire file from the beginning to get to the current frame. Which took longer and longer as the current frame advanced.
It's just so easy to squander performance without noticing.
The reason you need a GHz core is that modern GIFs stretch the file format to its limits, by doing 30 or even 60fps in extremely-coloured files with resolutions that easily beat the render resolution of 1980s PCs just in a little corner of the screen.
GIF is an awful format for its modern usage that will easily waste tens of megabytes for even a short and small file. That's why many services secretly convert GIF files and serve them as video files, or other animated files that are more efficient (such as WebP).
The difference in opinion between "the simple stuff" and "missing the bare basics" seems to come down to what year you were born and what kind of services you grew up with. I don't need 90% of what Discord has to offer me but when reading along with discussions of Discord users looking for alternative platforms, fleeing their age verification and such, I find that most Discord users will absolutely demand the features I didn't even know chat apps support.
I can imagine that your particular workload doesn't require all those bells and whistles, and I think it's probably true that only running the bare minimum software like you would back in the day is horrifically inefficient on modern operating systems. But, at the same time, kernels don't crash as often, disks encryption is actually a thing now, file downloads are no longer expressed in kilobits per second and the much prettier screens render much smoother media for a fraction of the performance impact.
Of course there are inefficiencies that could be fixed (like how chat apps are skins around browsers now) but a lot of efficient software from back in the day cost an arm and a leg to build. In the end, the software industry found out that customers are happier to pay when you deliver new features faster than when you deliver new features later (which still run on the old hardware, though the customer may have already replaced said hardware at the time you release your feature).
With current prices for RAM and other system components, I hope companies will once again feel the pressure to build for limited hardware. Then again, when I look at the hardware developers are lugging around, I highly doubt things will change quick enough.