You know, those older AT style computers were not that slow when
running the applications of the time. It's funny just how much faster
our CPU processing speed has become, while paradoxically the overhead
of the typical inflated application has proportionately slowed us
right back down again.....

Dave

My wife ran a fairly large retail operation with online ordering, inventory,
payroll and accounting, all on a 8086 4.77mz XT. It was lightning fast. We were
only "computing" with our computer tho. No cartoon interface.
The grove/gates philosophy is to create bloated software as fast as the
hardware people can create a machine to run it.
The funny thing is my old DOS apps run as fast on an XT as they do on a P4.
Pretty much at the speed I can type and the screen can display. The ONLY thing
that runs a tiny bit faster is a complicated dBase relational DB rollup and
that has more to do with disk caching than anything else.