Anytime you upgraded from a 4 year old computer to a new one back then - from 16Mhz to 90Mhz, or 75Mhz to 333Mhz, or 333Mhz to 1Ghz, or whatever - it was immediate, it was visceral.

SSDs booted faster and launched programs faster and were a very nice change, but they weren't that same sort of night-and-day 80s/90s era change.

The software, in those days, was similarly making much bigger leaps every few years. 256 colors to millions, resolution, capabilities (real time spellcheck! a miracle at the time.) A chat app isn't a great comparison. Games are the most extreme example - Sim City to Sim City 2000; Doom to Quake; Unreal Tournament to Battlefield 1942 - but consider also a 1995 web browser vs a 1999 one.

> Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago.

The only thing more impressive that hardware engineers' delivering continuous massive performance improvements for the past several decades is software engineers' ability to completely erase that with more and more bloated programs to do essentially the same thing.

> In my experience, SSDs had a bigger impact.

When SSDs became mainstream, yes, I agree they had a bigger impact than any CPU speed increases at that particular time.

But back in the double-digit MHz days of CPU speeds, upgrading your CPU was king when it came to better performance, and I'd argue that effect was more pronounced than the the HDD to SSD transition was. It's hard to convey what huge jumps CPUs were making during that time period, and how big a difference it made.

I also remember a time, somewhere in the middle of that, when adding more RAM could be a bigger boost than a CPU upgrade. But back in the 80s and 90s (and prior, but I have no personal experience with that), there was only so much RAM you could add, and the CPU was still often what was holding you back.

But CPUs just haven't been the bottleneck for most home user workloads for a long time now. These days when I buy a new laptop, I certainly want the best CPU I can get, but I'm more concerned about how much RAM I can put in it, and the iGPU's specs. (SSDs are a given, so I don't need to think much about it.)

> Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago.

I feel this. Humanity has peaked.

Agree 100%. the compute was always bottlenecked by insanely high i/o latency. SSDs opened up fast computers like no processor ever did.

Eh. In the 1980s and 1990s, the capabilities of the software you could run on your new computer were changing dramatically every two years or so. Completely new types of computer games and productivity software, vastly improved audio and video, more and more real-time functionality.

Nowadays, you really don't get these magical moments when you upgrade, not on the device itself. The upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 was basically just more ads. Games released today look about as good as games released 5-10 years ago. The music-making or photo-editing program you installed back then is still good. Your email works the same as before. In fact, I'm not sure I have a single program on my desktop that feels more capable or more responsive than it did in 2016.

There's some magic with AI, but that's all in the cloud.

I mean, HDD were much faster than floppy disks. Which were in turn much faster than tape cassettes. And so on...

This is silly. That's like saying that machines haven't gotten any better because a helicopter doesn't eat any less hay than a horse did.