The x1000 is a huge understatement. For example these days CPUs are much more optimal in terms of cycles per instruction and inversely instructions per cycle. B

The x1000 is a huge understatement. For example these days CPUs are much more optimal in terms of cycles per instruction and inversely instructions per cycle. Back then when multiplication of two word-sized(8 bits back then) values took 24 cycles, these days we can do that in 12 cycles for 64-bit values. Because of superscalar processing and thus instruction level parallelism, we can typically do 2-4 ALU operations in parallel(given that there's no data dependencies) and thus increase the instruction throughput 2-4 fold. Then, because of SIMD features and data level parallelism we can do same operaton on multiple data(say, operate on a vector of 4 elements in a single cycle) and thus we eliminate the need for repeated instructions. This all gets a bit complicated in modern days because of memory access costs and caches which try to alleviate the costs, but the idea is that modern CPUs are likely to be around 10 times as fast per-clock as 6502 and because of multiple cores and threads that value goes to something like 40-60. Add the huge increase in clock speed and you're a bit south from x100_000 in optimal case. I would hope every programmer would write some core on a C64 to really learn how much RAM the 64 KB really is. You can actually waste some of it and in some cases it really is "enough so that I don't have to optimize". :) Real hard-core people would go with VIC-20 which as only 5120 bytes of RAM, or Atari 2600 with 128 bytes of RAM. One could imagine there's nothing you can do with them but oh boy how wrong one would be! Heck, a single tweet is 140 characters. And you can fit that in 128 bytes. You really can... :)