Rich wrote in message <40A3C634.7000906@somewhere.com>...

This is simply not true. Since 1970 or so, processor speeds have
gone from 4 MHZ to 4,000 MHZ, that's a thousand times faster in
over 30 years. But computers are not 1,000 times faster as memory
has only gotten ten times faster, and everything else is dig slow.
Computers are faster than they were, but they are nowhere near
a thousand times faster.

Processor speeds have grown much more than thousand times in these 30 years.
An example:
A Pentium with its 32 bit databus can move 4 bytes per clock period.
I have a 4 MHz Z80 computer built in 1985, which has a block move instruction as well.
It takes 21 clock periods to move one byte.
And unlike modern computers, it doesn't have any cache memory.
Compiling a 3000 line program took 5 minutes,
the same job on a Pentium 133 built in 1986 takes less than 0.5 seconds,
i.e. a factor 600 in 11 years.

Alex.