Yeah, we had browsers back in the Windows 3 days
. You had that, plus basically a full OS able to run third party applications.In fact, in a virtual machine - from the time I press "enter" after typing "win" to the time Program Manager is done displaying all of its icons is less than a second. Windows 3 is fast on a modern system.
Of course, it was easy to hack and destroy stuff unintentionally too. A lot of what makes modern OSes slow is all of the security measures we have to use.
Of course language changes have also slowed stuff down: Today people want to develop in .NET, Java, various scripting languages, and of course the absolute mess of a language soup that drives the Internet stuff we have today.
