[Taniwha]

Only 20x? I started my career programming on a mainframe system with a 1MHz memory cycle time (think of this as it's 'clock speed') - it had 3 megabytes of memory and supported 40 timeshare users (on terminals) and batch streams. At one point we upgraded by adding 1.5Mb, it cost $1.25M

Compared to a modern CPU it was maybe 5000x slower, the early Vax systems that Unix ran on were maybe 6 times faster.

People certainly wrote smaller programs, we'd just stopped using cards and carrying more than a box around (1000) was a chore. You spent more time thinking about bugs (compiling was a lot slower, and they went in a queue, you were sharing the machine with others).

But we still got our work done, more thinking and waiting