>Back in the 80s, I worked for a company that used SBT accounting (written is dbase III). Their end of month processing would tie up a computer for 20 hours. I wrote a add-on that would distribute the processes over additional computers (Multi-computer Parallel Processing). And then converted the code to Foxpro 1.0. The entire task was reduced to 1.5 hours.

Once, in '98, I tweaked a complicated report (about recursively spreading common cost to lower units in given or implied percentages, so they'd know the estimate cost of every product, as good as it can get by the given rules), and couldn't get it to run below two minutes - on the then Pentium or maybe P2 machines, probably around 100MHz, in FPD2.6 under W98.

At some point I just gave up and told their accountant that this is as good as it gets, there's no way it can run faster. Then I asked how fast did they do it before.

"It took three of us two weeks to calculate, then another week to weed out the errors. Then by the time we had the numbers, it was too late, because some numbers had to be used far before that, so the decisions were made on eyeballed figures anyway. We can wait two, three or thirty minutes for correct numbers to come out, no problem at all."