Little of column a, little of column b. Yes, nostalgia is a factor, BUT:
- The lack of overhead required by security and 'features' like querying an internet search when you click the start menu or showing advertising in the calculator or better memory management in general, meant that overall UI response in that era used to be much _MUCH_ faster than it is today. Once upon a time you could operate your O/S with the speed of a Starcraft tournament winner; this simply is not possible any more.
- You could 'queue' commands - clicking the close button on an program and then (before it had finished closing) clicking the minimise button would minimise the program behind it immediately after the closing process finished. In this way you could chain/queue commands rather than being forced to wait for the OS to update between each step.
- Enter and Spacebar did different things. If a prompt had two buttons, one would be outlined with a thick black line that would respond to [Enter], and one would be outlined in a dotted line that would respond to [spacebar]. This is still the case sometimes but is far from ubiquitous.
- The top-left corner of the program was reserved for a 'system' menu used to move/resize the window, or quickly exit with a double-click. Though still used by some MS programs today like Explorer, its usefulness is lessened if not all programs utilise it.
- Don't even get me started on keyboard shortcuts.
These kinds of universally-accepted and _useful_ power-user-oriented design principles are almost absent from UX as it is implemented today.
I don't remember almost ever using the top left "system" menu after Windows 3.x. Windows 9x (and NT starting from 4.0) had dedicated buttons for maximizing, minimizing and closing windows with a single click. Moving and resizing could be done by grabbing the title bar or corners, as they can today.
I don't remember exactly how the resizing and moving as found in the menu worked. Maybe they allowed for resizing/moving without aiming at the relatively small corners or the title screen. But for that I much prefer the traditional Unix style of alt + click/drag anywhere on a window moving the window. Alt + right mouse button similarly resizes it.
That is a feature I have missed on Windows.
I do seem to remember sometimes using a series a key presses to minimize the window through the system menu without using the mouse. But that was also due to not having an actual keyboard shortcut for doing that.
The system window was handy for retrieving windows that had somehow ended up offscreen. Alt-space, M for move, hit an arrow key once, and then the window follows your cursor and ends up on screen by default. Still works in modern versions of Windows - it's somewhat obsolete now you can use Win+arrow keys to move a window around, but it might still be useful if your window has ended up somewhere and you can't figure out where.
Imperfect graphics drivers and an environment that changes screens and resolutions a lot means that once every few months some fucking application is going to wander off where I can't get to it, and no amount of Windows+directionkey will move it somewhere usable.
Windows 98 was from a time where the assumption a user was familiar with the computer wasn't made. We've since lost that assumption, and a lot with it.
