I don't think he's saying that what we have now is worse than what we had then. He's saying that with today's hardware we clearly can have instant start up times in pretty much every app. But we don't.

Even then, app launch times were around 5 seconds and once launched the UI didn’t lag for basic operations like dropdowns or opening “properties” dialog boxes. UIs were somehow always smooth despite running on 1/10th of the processing power we have now.

>Pentium 3 900 MHz

Why? I had XP on a CoreDuo 4GB ram and a 500GB disk, but even on my Pentium2 450Mhz and W2K the System feeling was snappier than Win10