CPU speeds were increasing rather slowly up until the mid 90's when suddenly we went from 33Mhz to 1Ghz and higher over the course of a few years it seemed. RA

CPU speeds were increasing rather slowly up until the mid 90's when suddenly we went from 33Mhz to 1Ghz and higher over the course of a few years it seemed. RAM was super expensive in this time frame, and the 6502 was conceived as a cheap industrial controller. So it was never meant to be part of a system with oodles and oodles of memory for the time, such as the VAXes and PDPs of the time. Surprised you're not complaining about the absence of floating point, but that didn't stop Bill Gates from implementing software floating-point on the 6502 BASICs he sold to Commodore, Atari Apple at the time.