At 8mhz? I'd imagine it rivals at least the Pentium III

Well, probably not, but maybe a plain Pentium?

The Pentium III was a superscalar core that scaled up to 1.4 GHz. This microcontroller is max 240 MHz and does less work per cycle.

Probably, I was use this example because I feel youngers can't imagine how much we could do with such MS-DOS class computer, even within its limitations.

So naturally an ESP32 can do so much more.