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by jbverschoor 870 days ago
Because of a fixed buffer/direct access to the buffer. Compared to line-based / control code streams
1 comments

Not really true just look midnight commander, it runs under Linux but have the look and feel of an old DOS app :)
It has the look but not the feel. Norton Commander was extremely fast on a 4.77mhz 8088 (basically an 8 bit processor pretending to be 16 bit. It took two clock cycles to move 16 bits across the bus). It's no comparison between those old DOS apps written in ASM that really optimized every instruction for a specific architecture. They felt 100x faster and more immediate than modern computers.