[jacquesm]

The point is (in case that wasn't obvious, apparently not) that the real world execution time of that program has improved more than 5 orders of magnitude (decimal ones at that).

So stuff that we'd be waiting for for a couple of days in the 80's can be done in a few seconds now. Of course that also means that we're generally much less aware of where the inefficiencies are until something really grinds to a halt but still, it's absolutely amazing to me even today that digital circuits can run at the speeds they have and that we can afford to run pretty numerically intensive stuff in interpreted languages and not bat an eye when the answer pops up in under a second.

2 MHz looked pretty good back in the day.

The computer I worked with most as a kid (besides the TRS-80 and the 'Dragon') was a BBC micro, it had an expansion bus for - no kidding - a second 6502 so you could have true parallelism. That meant you only had to wait for a day instead of two if you were taxing the machine and had something that was compute bound.