>>Not disagreeing, but I do think that the cycles are being used in a different way today, more to our advantage.
>>I think spellcheck might be an example.
>
>Even a better example is how a Windows message queue processes messages. Ever use Spy++ from the VS tools to view messages that an app receives? It's amazing that the whole thing doesn't slow to a crawl.


It ain't just Windows. Years ago a friend of mine had some kind of debugger that he could launch before DOS. Seems that DOS allocated 10-20 file handles that it then never used. They just sat there taking up memory.