You are right about how much harder higher clocks made things. PC mother boards got stuck at 33MHz for the longest time even though 50MHz processors were availa

You are right about how much harder higher clocks made things. PC mother boards got stuck at 33MHz for the longest time even though 50MHz processors were available. It took Intel coming out with the 486DX2 (50MHz inside the chip, 25MHz on the board) to get things moving again. A key transition was moving from the 1 and 2 layer printed circuit boards of 1970s e cheap 1980s computers to 4 layers like in the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh. The difference a ground and power plane makes in the waveforms is simply amazing.