> Indeed, and this went on for a good 10 years - possibly more - I think. Many more. An Apple II+ from 1979 was approaching obsolete in 1984. An IBM PC from

> Indeed, and this went on for a good 10 years - possibly more - I think. Many more. An Apple II+ from 1979 was approaching obsolete in 1984. An IBM PC from 1985 was obsolete by 1990. A 386 machine from 1990 was obsolete by 1995. A Pentium machine from 1995 was obsolete in 2000. A Pentium III from 2000 was nearly obsolete in 2005. This cycle started in the late 70s, and I guess continued until computers were "fast enough" for all the typical software they might run. Video was the last big one. Even very cheap computers are now fast enough to render complex documents and display video, more or less instantly (at least with the right software). So, for most users they subjectively seem "fast enough". Things do seem more stable these days, in terms of general compatibility. A Pentium III machine can still boot a current Linux distro, if rather slowly. And 20+ year old USB peripherals will still work on a modern machine. That's quite a change from the era when a new, incompatible architecture or peripheral bus came out every five years.