Software was simpler, so it was easier to optimize.
Also, hardware was very limited and that meant you were forced to optimize if you wanted to sell anything.
The public was accustomed that the software should be nimble and run fast. If you would have given the regular Electron app to the '90s public they would have been displeased.
Hardware limits and developers being more thoughtful and less lazy are pretty much the answer.
In the 90s most software was C/C++ running on hardware. Now we have layers upon layers of abstractions. VMs, Kubernetes, Docker, jitted languages, OOP codebases written against Uncle Bob's preachings and GoF patterns. And the jitted language is best scenario. Many software is written in interpreted languages.
If anyone cares to make a trivial benchmark, it would be telling: write a simple C program and time it. Write the same in Java or .NET, but use a class for everything and introduce some abstractions like builders, factories etc. Run the program in a container in a virtalized Kubernetes cluster. Time it.
The public was accustomed that the software should be nimble and run fast. If you would have given the regular Electron app to the '90s public they would have been displeased.
Hardware limits and developers being more thoughtful and less lazy are pretty much the answer.
In the 90s most software was C/C++ running on hardware. Now we have layers upon layers of abstractions. VMs, Kubernetes, Docker, jitted languages, OOP codebases written against Uncle Bob's preachings and GoF patterns. And the jitted language is best scenario. Many software is written in interpreted languages.
If anyone cares to make a trivial benchmark, it would be telling: write a simple C program and time it. Write the same in Java or .NET, but use a class for everything and introduce some abstractions like builders, factories etc. Run the program in a container in a virtalized Kubernetes cluster. Time it.