"The marketers tell us that if cars were like computers the cars we would be buying today would be absurdly cheap and absurdly fast, but it just isn't so. I got my first personal computer for about $1000 in 1975. That is still what they cost. The graphics are better. The computer is bigger and faster, and doing more complex things, but that is what you would expect after 25 years of progress. My first machine ran at about one hundred thousand instructions per second and my current machine runs at one hundred million, 1000x faster. My first machine was so slow that it would take several seconds to boot up and would sometimes just go away while executing system code on badly written programs and I could not type for up to twenty seconds. My current PC is 1000 times faster, but the programs seem to be 1000 times bigger and slower because it now takes about a minute to boot up and it still goes away for about twenty seconds sometimes while the OS and GUI do who knows what sometimes and appears dead and will not accept a keystroke for that period of time." www.ultratechnology.com/forth.htm