yep and that was Windows which introduced levels of latency and waiting times much worse than equivalent DOS software, but with easier to use and more intuitive menus instead of the usual DOS UI routine of either no menus or menus that showed with key combos, and power users knowing many key combination combos which weren't strictly necessary but both accelerated things and impressed newbs into thinking computers were too hard for them

on a 486, Lotus 1-2-3 was essentially instant - even from floppy disks it would run faster than excel does today on a top of the line machine

I did earn some bread with vba as well, and always advocate for efficiency, but I just opened a 12MB xlsx file in LO, and it took a couple of seconds on a 2024 thinkpad.

As far as I remember, my Win 3.11 machine (a 486 DX with 4MB RAM and 30MB HDD) wouldn't be able to store or open such a file, let alone recognize the extension. Also, it would call the file 2026022~.XL~ or something. And it took more than a couple of seconds to load office programs for sure. It would take well over a minute to load a book from a 1.44MB floppy.

Anyway, software and computers have come a long way and I'm grateful for it.