Remember that was the era of single processor PCs, if you had a really demanding CPU hog you generally had to forget about trying to multitask as the experience would be painful. If you had something like file compression happening (which could also occupy the HDD) it'd leave little for the UI redrawing, and this is also long before that aspect was accelerated
right, but you can also bring a modern system to its knees with a high enough load. the new systems suck by default. keyboard response time is much higher than ever because of the accumulation of abstraction strata.
