One of the reasons why I love the Angry Videogame Nerd is that when he came out, the state of third-generation retrogaming nostalgia involved a lot of wearing of rose-colored glasses. Remember Castlevania? Remember Mega Man? Double Dragon? Remember having to blow on the cartridges before they'd work (which never did really work)? Etc. The AVGN stood as a counterpoint to all that, reminding us that many of the games from that era -- even games we loved or wanted -- kind of sucked, and that we can appreciate modern games for the extra bit of care that went in to them to make them not suck so bad. (This was 2004, though, and what goes around comes around...)
The same is kind of true of retrocomputing. We look back to these old platforms as if due to coming from a "simpler time", they never had any latency and never experienced bugs. And sure, if you fire it up for five minutes on some online WebAssembly emulator you find on Hackernews, it seems much snappier and more pleasant to use than Windows 11. But back then, we were running them on CPUs literally hundreds of times slower than even a potato-class computer from today. And due to memory protection being frickin' absent from almost all consumer-grade operating systems, they crashed. A lot. Even the Amiga was crash- and Guru-Meditation-prone depending on what you were running on it. It was such an enormous relief for me, trying out Linux or even Windows NT for the first time, to watch the OS simply yeet out a misfiring app; disconnect any access it had to the network, file system, or window system; and proceed merrily on its way as if nothing happened. Not following the exact sequence of steps it required to set up the message pump properly so that your program can respond to messages as required in Windows 3.1, for instance, can cause strange glitches within Windows itself, requiring a restart of Windows; or even hard-lock the system requiring a cold boot.
Our computers are so powerful these days, and our software so sophisticated, that they've eliminated entire classes of problems from the old days, only to open the door to entirely new classes of problems (like adware that would have brought a Pentium II to its knees, and sparked a user complaint campaign that would have resulted in major egg on the vendor's face if not bankruptcy from the ensuing lawsuits, being routine, and even required, on commercial operating systems of today).
Offtopic, but here's how to feel old: More time has passed between the debut of the AVGN and the present, than has passed between the debut of the NES in the West and the debut of the AVGN.
The same is kind of true of retrocomputing. We look back to these old platforms as if due to coming from a "simpler time", they never had any latency and never experienced bugs. And sure, if you fire it up for five minutes on some online WebAssembly emulator you find on Hackernews, it seems much snappier and more pleasant to use than Windows 11. But back then, we were running them on CPUs literally hundreds of times slower than even a potato-class computer from today. And due to memory protection being frickin' absent from almost all consumer-grade operating systems, they crashed. A lot. Even the Amiga was crash- and Guru-Meditation-prone depending on what you were running on it. It was such an enormous relief for me, trying out Linux or even Windows NT for the first time, to watch the OS simply yeet out a misfiring app; disconnect any access it had to the network, file system, or window system; and proceed merrily on its way as if nothing happened. Not following the exact sequence of steps it required to set up the message pump properly so that your program can respond to messages as required in Windows 3.1, for instance, can cause strange glitches within Windows itself, requiring a restart of Windows; or even hard-lock the system requiring a cold boot.
Our computers are so powerful these days, and our software so sophisticated, that they've eliminated entire classes of problems from the old days, only to open the door to entirely new classes of problems (like adware that would have brought a Pentium II to its knees, and sparked a user complaint campaign that would have resulted in major egg on the vendor's face if not bankruptcy from the ensuing lawsuits, being routine, and even required, on commercial operating systems of today).
Offtopic, but here's how to feel old: More time has passed between the debut of the AVGN and the present, than has passed between the debut of the NES in the West and the debut of the AVGN.