Anyone of a certain age who has used Ms. Dos will have come across at some point terminate and stay resident programs or tsrs. The shareware scene was absolutely full of them... There were tsrs for music, for calculators, for notepads and all sorts....

But the undisputed master of the tsrs was Ball and sidekick. An absolutely amazing piece of program which at the press of a button could bring up a calculator, editor and more...

It was the ultimate in hassle-free utility.

We take it for granted now that when you open a document, it's going to take 5 to 20 seconds for the document to open.. despite our computers being hundreds of thousands to millions of times faster than they used to be.. there really is no need for it. 99% of people only use Microsoft word to type stuff in and then maybe change the font... And yet in order to do that it has to load in gigabytes of irrelevant crap.

Kids nowadays have this view that computers used to be slow and we used to have to wait ages for stuff. But in actual fact the opposite was almost always the case. Everything was immediate because it was in memory. That was the beauty of a TSR. Terminate and stay resident... It meant that it was always running in the background ready to come to the foreground at the press of a button. No waiting. Even loading something heavyweight like would perfect. Took maybe a couple of seconds at most.. even from a floppy disk, it would often be ready much faster than Microsoft word is now on an SSD... How can this possibly be the case?? The truth is that modern operating systems and programs are hideously badly coded. I know that many people will argue with me on that, but I believe it to be a self-evident truth. In order to type some words in on a machine that is a million times faster, the program should load a million times faster... Not five times slower..

To my mind, any excuse that people throw to give why computers are slower to do tasks these days is spurious. It's apologising for the way that software is built these days. The.net framework, python, and the incredible inefficiencies of the file system underneath windows.

Of course, most of that comes from the fact that we now have abstraction layers. Every piece of code doesn't have to get built from the ground up in assembly anymore. You can now code to an abstraction layer. Like.net... the obstruction layer then does all of the hard work of drawing the UI and managing all of the network and file operations.... And yet most of those are built using the same obstruction layer... Which uses tools built with the same abstraction layer...

It's never going to improve unless we reach an absolute hard limit on what computation can achieve, which is really unlikely.. it's always going to be possible to build a bigger computer. But look what happened in the old days when a computer was built that could not be expanded or upgraded.. years would pass and people got better and better at building software for it... The software which would come out on day one would look like a child's toy compared to the amazing stuff which would come out a decade later....

But that same loop isn't happening on modern machines.. you just accept that the software is slow and tell people to upgrade. Tell them to get more memory.. or just get a better hard drive?.... And so crap software stays crap... New crap software is built to replace the old crap software with no impetus to make it sharper... Because everyone always knows that you can just buy in new CPU or more memory..

So this is one of the reasons why I'm really enjoying Linux, because some of the ethos of making things Sharp and tight is still there in the free software area. Getting more out of less is almost entirely their ethos... You can run a full operating system with modern software on a machine from a decade ago or more... That's impossible with Windows because everything is too fat. You can have TSR like functionality in Linux, with software like guake... Stuff just appears on screen. And look at how much faster gimp is to load on Linux compared to Windows....

When I'm using my work laptop it amazes me how long I'm sitting waiting for documents to open... Or how Excel just seems to completely ignore me when I try to open something.... I just don't get that in Linux..

I think one of the things that people will never achieve will be that immediately that you get from sci-fi computers where you just ask it a question and it gives you an answer, or you press a button on the screen immediately changes to show the relevant information.... We've entered an era where we just accept crap news and don't push back when we're just told that we have to upgrade or just wait for the next software patch.

So I still hark back to the old days of those wonderful tsrs where you could press a single button, calculate something, and then press a button to make it go away... Or put something into a diary with a single button. Click and be back to coding within a couple of seconds.... It may not have been as slick Windows 11 user interface but by got it was a lot faster to get the minutia of office life done!