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Windows 98 wasn't composited, which makes a huge difference.

And to be clear, there's a ton of unnecessary bloat today as well. It's just that even a lean and mean highly hand optimized native app is gonna be way bigger today than it was then, due to compositing, higher resolution assets, higher resolution screens and different design sensibilities. But most apps aren't lean and mean highly hand optimized native apps so.

by Dylan1680711 hours ago|

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Compositing means you can excuse an extra dozen megabytes per megapixel of window size. The window in the article is less than a megapixel. That factors in the relevant part of screen resolution too. High resolution assets should scale alongside window size too, adding a fraction of the above dozen megabytes.

And I'm saying 98SE already had image-heavy design sensibilities all over.

You don't have to highly hand optimize to run a weather UI in a lean way.

by vel0city11 hours ago|

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> and a common screen size at the time was 1280x1024

Maybe if you were really rich and only used high end desktops. A lot of the computers I used back then were still 800x600, fancier ones were 1024x768. If you happened to also have a 2D accelerator card you'd potentially have 1280x1024. And lots of apps purposefully ran at a much lower color depth, it was common for games to run at 8 or 16 bit color mode.

by Dylan1680711 hours ago|

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I saw a lot of computers set to 800x600 but I don't recall any that couldn't be switched to at least 1024x768. Which is still quite close to 720p for making this comparison.

And yeah lots of fullscreen-ish things ran in lower color, but this is about desktop mode and I never saw a desktop mode that struggled based on color depth.

by kasabali7 hours ago|

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Cheapest local brand 15" CRTs could do 1280x1024 in early 2000s. because you weren't limited by the panel unlike LCDs.

You'd need better than perfect vision to be able to make use of it, though.

by vel0city5 hours ago|

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It's less of a question of if you could get a CRT that could do it versus having a PC with the video RAM and drawing performance to do it effectively at high color bit depth. Tons of extremely common desktops at the time shipped with only 2-4MB video memory with their integrated graphics chipsets. You're not doing 1280x1024 at 32-bit color with 2MB of RAM.

by koyote6 hours ago|

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Early 90s maybe. By the end of the 90s and definitely early 2000s CRT screens were 1024×768 for the cheap crap and 1600×1200 for the high-end (with 1280×1024 as a mid-range).

by vel0city5 hours ago|

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Yeah sure you can take a machine with only 4MB of video memory and try to draw a 1600x1200 CRT, but you're not going to be able to have that many colors.

It often wasn't a limitation of your monitor, it was a limitation of your video adapter. Rattling off some common specs of monitors isn't telling the full story of what most random people were actually experiencing.

I still remember having to upgrade our main home desktop at the time of Warcraft I I'd release because it didn't have enough video memory to meet the 8MB minimum needed. That was in 2002 on a machine purchased with XP, a Pentium 4 HT with 512MB of system memory. Not necessarily a low end machine, but obviously not a gaming PC at the time and much newer than many systems sold for Windows 98.