100MHz, so to be clear, we're talking about like an early Pentium. 1995ish. So that 100MHz computer had maybe 8 or 16MB of RAM - it was struggling to run anyth

100MHz, so to be clear, we're talking about like an early Pentium. 1995ish. So that 100MHz computer had maybe 8 or 16MB of RAM - it was struggling to run anything other than the text editor you were using - no, you aren't running an MP3 player in the background, winamp has not been released yet; no you are not running your email client in the background, you're on a 28.8K dialup modem and you are not hanging on the line on the offchance that mail arrives - you are dialing up, waiting 30 seconds for the modem to handshake, then watching your emails trickle in at a rate of one every few seconds. The machine took noticeable time to seek and load or save to the hard disk, so it made up for that by trying to keep everything in RAM all the time, with the downside that if it crashed (and it frequently crashed) you would lose all your work since you last hit save. So yes, the cursor responded right away when you pressed a key. But other than that, golden days, those were not.