Comment by reaperducer

What else am I missing in this thought experiment? Honest question.

Even though I/O was slower on the VAX, with the smaller number of bytes going back-and-forth, it would probably be snapper than a modern app.

I remember when computers were advertised as supporting eight concurrent users running spreadsheets at the same time on a single machine with 64K of RAM. Often off of two or four floppy disks. No Winchester drives.

64K of RAM was stupid expensive at the time. I always wondered if they made it up selling terminals.

I also remember a high school keeping all of its records on several thousand students on two Commodore PETs hooked into a single 8050 (two 512K floppy drives) through a device called a MUPPET ("Multiple PETs").