I wonder if those were fast enough nostalgia says yes but I bet it was dog slow if we tried today with 2026 lens.

My Turbo Pascal programs could calculate and print to the screen faster than could be read, on a 486. With DOS however.

I picked the P90 because I remember running Linux ~1.0 and/or NT on it, with real multitasking and services etc. Those soaked up many of the cycles.

Another story, around Y2k/Win2k was asked to write a C program to record all the files/sizes on the C: in to file. Then something would be installed, my program run again, and the results diffed. Despite thousands of files the program was done before the enter key came back up. Boss told me that he thought the program was cheating.

That’s just how fast modern computers are these days, I said. When running C code anyway. That perf is still available today, compare astral’s uv to slow competitors. Just takes some investment, though probably less when boosted by VC bionics.