The IO at the time was terrible, also because,if memory serves me right, plenty of disks/controllers didn't support DMA transfers. But if you had a few megabyt

The IO at the time was terrible, also because,if memory serves me right, plenty of disks/controllers didn't support DMA transfers. But if you had a few megabytes to spare for caching (not everybody did, for sure) the machines would be snappy, because the UI was.