If there's anything that can make you realize how vast the computing resources we have at our disposal are, it's the fact that 1970's and 80's era 8-bit compute

If there's anything that can make you realize how vast the computing resources we have at our disposal are, it's the fact that 1970's and 80's era 8-bit computers, running BASIC programs, even though this was hundreds of times slower than running machine-code programs, were still considered very useful tools. Outside of high-speed games, the principal complaints that people had back in the day with running BASIC programs had very little to do with the execution speed and more to do with the memory, tooling and display limitations of the platforms they were working with. It's a great miracle that now, in the modern age, we've managed to build up such intense piles of abstraction that it's not unusual to see a machine capable of billions of operations a second perform as fast as a machine capable of millions of operations a second that was also running BASIC code.