I was watching a guy on YouTube the other day talking about a computer he was building. He made reference to how he was keeping some component simple (the memor

I was watching a guy on YouTube the other day talking about a computer he was building. He made reference to how he was keeping some component simple (the memory interface, I believe), which would compromise performance, but he wasn't worried about it because the 68000 he was using in it was so fast. My first thought was "yeah, that makes sense" but my second was "what could it possibly mean when we talk about a 68000 being 'fast' in 2021?!" It really made me think about how an attribute like "fastness" can get endowed and then still stick 40 years later, almost as though it were describing some spiritual attribute that transcends the fact that a modern $0.25 microcontroller is many times more performant.