Twenty years of wasted cycles ...

No surprises in this article:

86 Mac Plus Vs. 07 AMD DualCore. You Won't Believe Who Wins

... When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity."

See also my post on FullWrite Professional. I work with some very sophisticated developers using cutting edge .NET libraries, domain specific languages and very complex architectures ... but I also remember when programs written in Macintosh Pascal were reliable and fast on hardware that couldn't run a modern phone.

I suspect we'd be better off today if we'd stuck with Pascal and never touched C++. A 1990 geek would be shocked by how little improvement we've seen over the past 18 years.

On the other and, I wouldn't try editing a 12MB Canon CRF file on that Mac Plus!