Remember there was a lot less to the Linux kernel at the time. Wasn't too bad. The single-threaded compile time for Linux has stayed fairly consistent for awhil

Remember there was a lot less to the Linux kernel at the time. Wasn't too bad. The single-threaded compile time for Linux has stayed fairly consistent for awhile, since the tree grows about as fast as the average desktop improves. The big improvement in compile time has come from being able to compile with 8-32+ threads.