>>106502180
They were, that is true. I base my experience on a mid-range 2006 PC which was running Windows 7 (and XP earlier on) and was used for multimedia, Office, playing some older games and later browsing the web. I cannot say for sure how it would compare to modern PCs at the last task (because the web from back then no longer exists) but at all the other it is significantly faster than or nearly as fast as my i7 MacBook Pro from 2018 running the latest version of macOS. I'm talking about the general speed of human interaction and snappiness in equivalent software, not raw throughput measured by benchmarks.
>Yeah but hard drives were way slower than modern drives so they still sucked on those OS
It didn't matter because a) filesystem caching did a good job at mitigating long seek time and b) software was optimized for contemporary hardware and was NOT CPU-bound to the extent it is now. Office 2003 / 2007 felt much faster and more responsive there than M365 software does on R9 5950X and Samsung 980 Pro, for example.