My first venture into the PC world was with a PC with a 16-bit data bus, based on intel's 80186 CPU. Later, I switched to a 25 MHz PC/AT-clone that was based on a Cyrix CPU. Even the very first PC/XT clones with which I had contact, and those were VERY much slower than the ones I owned, did the basic stuff, e.g. editing (with WordStar) database (with DB2) and the like, much faster than comparable programs under Windows. Now, they didn't have the "kewl" look and feel, but many things that take minutes under Windows after Win98SE, took no more than 1 second with the old DOS stuff, and most of those things were over by the time my pinkie was off the <enter> key.

That's not to say that there aren't some pretty good tools under Windows, but I'd bet a week's pay that, had they existed under DOS, written in a simple 'C' or even ASM, and tailored to run in the minute memory model available back then, they'd have been much faster and crashed much less often. After all, they were necessarily much simpler to architect.

RE