Put an SSD and a modern emulation behind Windows 98 and it flies. You’re excusing inefficient software because it was paired with improved hardware.

But it didn’t do much? This was an OS where plugging in a USB device required a reboot. Where connecting to the Internet required running winsock. Where most of the software had hard 16bit limits like the max size of file notepad could open being 32k and excel having 65535 rows.

It wasn’t efficient it was limited.

It was an offline OS for an offline era. It ran trusted software (everything it ran was something the user had explicitly installed) so it didn’t need to work to protect the user from malicious code. It wasn’t encrypting everything it wrote tot he hard drive or all its network traffic (if it was even handling network traffic). It didn’t support Unicode or vector typeface rendering and realtime video rendering at more than 300x200 pixels.

Computers are doing so much more nowadays.