Yep, particularly since touching the disk meant a 5-1/4" floppy diskette. But no, the programs weren't toys. They were an order of magnitude more complex than

Yep, particularly since touching the disk meant a 5-1/4" floppy diskette. But no, the programs weren't toys. They were an order of magnitude more complex than most of today's smart phone apps. And in fact, PCs were the smart phones of their day -- a fun size version of what had been considered "real" computing, initially not taken seriously, but destined to evolve quickly. Also you had direct access to the hardware -- there weren't ten layers of virtualization, protection, and APIs in between. You could do near-realtime things, very low latency. I think that's part of what contributed to the subjective experience being quite fast... provided you didn't need to hit the floppy disk!