[tracker1]

I had an original IBM PC XT (used) with a 10MB full height (2x today's 5.25") MFM hard drive.. it had about 3MB of available disk space and took I swear 6+ minutes to boot.

It actually ran faster double-spaced (stacker) and had nearly 12MB of available space... didn't have any problems with programs loading, surprisingly enough.. which became more of an issue when moving onto a 486.

Yeah, when your storage is so relatively slow, the CPU can run compression, you can get impressive gains in space and performance.