I had a look at the architecture of the B5000 system they're talking of (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burro

I had a look at the architecture of the B5000 system they're talking of (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems). It's really completely different from today's architectures and I have the feeling we're emulating a lot of the functionality in software today. This gives some credibility to Kay's claim that "a benchmark from 1979 at Xerox PARC runs only 50 times faster today". (This number really baffled me.)