I believe old software ran better on old computers than new software on new computers. There wasn’t much waiting for the UI when I used my Amiga with a 7Mhz processor. That’s around 570 times less than on my dual G5. Even my phone is technically running over 30 times faster than the Amiga. And that if anything is unbelievable.

Funny you mentioned the copy+paste thing. There’s been some discussion about it lately, probably started by Anil Dash’s post on reinventing copy & paste.

At least when talking about M$ Office products the truth is 95% of all users are using less than 5% of those features that cost 85% of the package. I find MS Word 2.0 more than enough for everyday tasks.

Sometimes it feels like even those basic (= most used) features are getting less and less usable by every release.. Like can you imagine how much “usefull” data there is included within a simple copy+paste operation? A lot! Also did you ever realise that simple .doc file including just text “Hello World” takes 24kb of disc space and contains that “Hello World” phrase 4 times inside the file :) No that’s what I call Microsoft-way-of-optimizing stuff.

PS. Old software runs on old computer as well as new software on new computer.