alt Hacker NewsThat's my point, the software was getting bloated at least as fast as the CPUs were getting faster, so you had to upgrade to a new CPU every few years to run the latest software. With SSDs, there was a huge overlap in CPU speeds that may or may not have an SSD, so upgrading to one meant a huge performance boost, within the same set of runnable software.
Also, going from Sim City to Sim City 2000 was pre-bloat. Over the course of five years, the new version was significantly better than the original, but they both target the same 486 processor generation, which was brand new when the original SimCity was released, but rather old by the time SimCity 2000 was released. Another five years later, Sim City 3000 added minimal functionality, but required not just a Pentium processor, but a fast one.
I guess what I'm getting at is that a faster CPU means programs released after it will run better, but faster storage means that all programs, old and new, will run better.
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I wouldn't call that bloat; certainly we've been complaining about software bloat as long as I've been into computers, but at that time, software was simply pushing the capabilities of the hardware, and often running into walls.
These days, we value developer productivity over performance optimization, so we have stuff like Electron apps. The reason behind it is that CPUs (and RAM quantity, for the most part) are so far ahead of regular desktop applications that it doesn't matter. In the 80s and 90s, the hardware could barely keep up with decently-optimized software that wanted to do anything interesting.
> That's my point, the software was getting bloated at least as fast as the CPUs were getting faster
I think there's a difference between bloat and actually useful features or performance.
For example, I started making music with computers in the early 90s. They were only powerful enough to control external equipment like synthesizers.
Nowadays, I can do everything I could do with all that equipment on an iPad! I would not call that bloat.
On the other hand, comparing MS Teams to say ICQ, yeah, a lot of that is bloat.