Re: A mear shadow of the Beast!
The clever tricks that made it so amazing at the time were also the things that made it hard to keep up as technology progressed. Remember the general rule of computing that anything that requires specialist hardware today can be done cheaper and better in software on commodity boxes in 18 months.
Anyway, there was lots of dependence on timing in terms of how the co-processors interacted and the special modes for copper that allowed memory access without CPU involvement. It wasn't possible to vastly increase the speed of those interactions (in a Moore's law context) without breaking backwards compatibility. Also, in our networked, security-conscious world, there was no memory management.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
