I don't know about word processing performance, as I never did word processing.
I worked with (3D) graphics and computation intensive processing as well as modelling packages and the experience was horrible compared to today.
I have particularly fond memories of the workflow we used for a film project back in the late 90s. The lab only had so many editing stations and they were shared across multiple groups. So for each editing session we first had to copy the project from multiple CDRs onto the editing machine (which took ages on the 4x SCSI CD drives), edit, then burn the project to a set of CDs - performing various rituals to ensure the ROM image wouldn't be corrupted by a butterfly coughing in the corner or something - clean up the HDD so the next group could get working and hope the CDRs were even readable.
The editing experience itself wasn't great either: forget about real time scrubbing or full resolution previews.
Today you can edit films on a phone much quicker, more comfortably and with significantly higher quality.
No disappointment there for sure.
Same goes for 3D modelling packages, rendering and just plain number crunching in Mathematica, Maple or MATLAB.
Word processing is the one area that simply is so primitive by its very nature, that it's trivial to reach peak-efficiency without throwing tons of compute power and tech in general at it. If word processing is all you do, you don't need more than a glorified electric typewriter.
For many, many other applications - and yes, that even includes just taking and sharing pictures in real time - today's technology is vastly superior to anything the 80s and 90s had to offer.
I work in scientific computing so I definitely don't miss SGI workstations either. My complaint is just that even the simplest tasks, like word processing, end up taking orders of magnitude more computing power (or just don't work very well). The average commercial web page is an extreme example of this - I'd rather go back to mid-90s layouts and animated GIFs than endure most news sites. (I wonder how much of the demand for steady increases in computing speed was simply driven by the need to slam the consumer with as many advertisements as possible.)
But yes, it is impressive that my $500 phone blows away the $50,000 workstations I started on.
I worked with (3D) graphics and computation intensive processing as well as modelling packages and the experience was horrible compared to today.
I have particularly fond memories of the workflow we used for a film project back in the late 90s. The lab only had so many editing stations and they were shared across multiple groups. So for each editing session we first had to copy the project from multiple CDRs onto the editing machine (which took ages on the 4x SCSI CD drives), edit, then burn the project to a set of CDs - performing various rituals to ensure the ROM image wouldn't be corrupted by a butterfly coughing in the corner or something - clean up the HDD so the next group could get working and hope the CDRs were even readable.
The editing experience itself wasn't great either: forget about real time scrubbing or full resolution previews. Today you can edit films on a phone much quicker, more comfortably and with significantly higher quality. No disappointment there for sure.
Same goes for 3D modelling packages, rendering and just plain number crunching in Mathematica, Maple or MATLAB.
Word processing is the one area that simply is so primitive by its very nature, that it's trivial to reach peak-efficiency without throwing tons of compute power and tech in general at it. If word processing is all you do, you don't need more than a glorified electric typewriter.
For many, many other applications - and yes, that even includes just taking and sharing pictures in real time - today's technology is vastly superior to anything the 80s and 90s had to offer.