That is a commentary on the performance of that software, not on the quality of its interface. Run the same app on a machine from 2000, and it'll be blazing fast - and have sane UX.
> more responsive, more intuitive, faster to start up, more reliable, easier to learn
More responsive? No. No it wasn’t. Disks were slow. Memory capacity was low. You used to have to use third party RAM disk software to complete some tasks in a reasonable time. Or install a ram doubler to let you work on reasonable sized documents at the expense of slowing your machine down even more.
More intuitive? Hard disagree. The example I gave above was of getting a word count. You had to find the menu option to do that - it wasn’t just visible on screen. Same with spellcheck. Global search and replace was slow and clunky and felt risky. You only had one level of undo.
Faster to startup? Hells no. Again, slow disks.
More reliable? There was no auto save. Everyone who used a computer in the 90s has a story of losing hours, or even weeks of work to a crash. Everyone.
Easier to learn? Learn how? Word came with a few hundred pages of dead tree manual, but if you were on an institutional machine or running a ‘borrowed’ copy you didn’t have that. There was no internet to look up how to do stuff. Maybe you could pick stuff up from the tips section of a magazine? Sure. It was super easy to learn.
Compared to all of which, google docs or Word365 is just… light years ahead.
Fair enough. As far as I'm concerned, "peak UX" on the desktop was somewhere around late 00s, anyway. Although even early 00s were superior to the current sorry state of affairs.
