I think a lot of the perceived slowness is now the fact that so much more is reliant on the network now - and more often than not requires several hops over the

I think a lot of the perceived slowness is now the fact that so much more is reliant on the network now - and more often than not requires several hops over the public internet to some data centre somewhere. As a reminder - network is really really slow compared to pretty much anything else: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_latency.html https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_l... I'd not be surprised if the author's library search terminal from the 80s had a local copy of the index, or at least the index was stored on a server on the same lightly-loaded LAN as the terminal. My home laptop is hugely, hugely faster than ones I've had a decade ago for local workloads, but my network connection's latency and bandwidth have not improved nearly as fast.