If by "any present day work" you mean "web development," then maybe I buy your point. I know plenty of climate science and financial programmers who spend 100%

If by "any present day work" you mean "web development," then maybe I buy your point. I know plenty of climate science and financial programmers who spend 100% of their development time SSHed somewhere else, or who write reporting code using a minimal test case set of data that runs in 1s on their (slow, old) machine. For these people a slow, old machine is often totally acceptable - it doesn't take much horsepower to SSH (or even to run emacs and perl locally).