If you limit yourself to sane, 1.0 web simple pages such as Hacker News, sure. If you need to visit anything using unoptimized 100+ MB of Javascript? Good Luck.
For a 20 year old machine, sure. But any machine that was decent 10 years ago should be at least okay today. My 2008 Thinkpad handles all but the heaviest websites without too much trouble, as long as I don't have too many tabs open at a time.
Agreed, I am using a 2009 Toshiba laptop with Pop! on it, I did some cheap upgrades (maxed RAM to 10GB, used a spare SSD to replace the old HD), it's perfectly usable.
If only developers felt the same way. I'm also exhausted by a lot of modern software. There's not much I can do about the modern web though. I've learned to be patient. Stockholm syndrome.
It was a pretty powerful machine back then - quad core, 16GB RAM, SSD, 1GB GPU. Not a fast machine today by any means, and not my primary machine, but more than adequate for checking email and watching a tutorial on something.
Stick to fast software and it is still a decent experience. Is two or three seconds of loading before the 15 minute YouTube video a long time to wait?
Those were awful, especially the first gen, but I have fond memories of them since it was the first time young me could afford anything new and shaped like a laptop.
The MSI Wind U100 with an Atom N270 CPU would even overclock. It didn't help, but it would do it.
Compared to the size of the site, and the features? Yeah, most of them involve some amount of JS. Besides, HN is all dynamic user generated content, that's the crux of web 2.0.
How I perceive it is that web 2.0 is about dynamic loaded content and as far as I know HN doesn't do this but loads static pages from a server just like ye old web 1.0 forum pages would do.
If you go off Wikipedia's definition, it's more about user generated content and HN is definitely that. Might not meet your definition of web 2.0, but it meets this one:
>A Web 2.0 website allows users to interact and collaborate with each other through social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community. This contrasts the first generation of Web 1.0-era websites where people were limited to viewing content in a passive manner.
I'm not going to argue which web it belongs to, just comment that that definition is a bit odd. Forums would fit that definition, and have existed for far longer. phpBB itself is over 20 years old even.
I know it's all arbitrary, but it feels like there should probably be a better definition than the ones given.
At the risk of arguing the semantics of what is ultimately a marketing term rather than a technical term, Web 1.0 did actually have JavaScript - it was usually a simpler, more restrained usage, with no XMLHttpRequest.
