Bring up the circa 1985 Amiga (or Macintosh) OS in emulation and marvel at how responsive it is given the unbelievably primitive (by today's standards) technolo

Bring up the circa 1985 Amiga (or Macintosh) OS in emulation and marvel at how responsive it is given the unbelievably primitive (by today's standards) technology. The entire memory of the machine was less than it takes to store a smallish JPEG image (and decoding even a GIF was a major undertaking on the order of 1 minute runtime) and the whole OS fit on an 880KB floppy with plenty of room left over for your files (plus 256KB ROM of course). And then marvel at how much stuff you take for granted these days that just doesn't exist, from antialiased fonts to any kind of network connectivity to, of course, instant decoding of highly compressed sound and graphics assets. The fact is we got to all the modern conveniences by the path of least resistance. You take it for granted that a good smartphone costs less than a floppy drive - just the drive, no "brains") would have cost in the mid 80s and that all the software functionality on it comes essentially for free. In the alternate universe, your phone would be 1/10 as powerful, run software that's 1000x as efficient... and probably cost 10x as much.