It is not the swapping. The ~5 MIPS of a TT isn’t a huge amount of computing power.leech wrote: Though one would think part of that might be due to memory swapping? Back when I first started using Linux, I think I had 32mb of RAM and it swapped a lot once I started up a few applications, which of course slows everything to a crawl.
I’ve got a 68040/33 (about 20-30 MIPS) with 128 MB RAM running with A/UX 3. The A/UX itself is quick & fast, but don’t even think of opening a X11 session to a modern computer and run something more advanced than xbiff, xclock and xeyes over X11 on that remote computer. Again, the computing is done on the modern machine, the 68040 only needs to the X11 drawing locally. 'nedit' is okay, but LibreOffice? Firefox? Chromium? Opera? Forget it. Painfully slow.
Why? It seems these modern software doesn’t really use X11 drawing primitives, but essentially implement their own drawing and then bitblt. Which means, the 680x0 receives near-full screen size huuuge bitmaps for every scroll line. Yaaawn.
Even faster MIPS-based X11 hardware accelerated terminals (HP Envizex II and similar) are basically unusable for such modern software.
But as tenox said, using a 680x0 as a 'modern' UNIX workstation is some (power of n) too small. Heck, Firefox is painfully slow on a Pentium II/300. And that CPU crushes the 68060 easily.
You may run what was up-to-date back then, and that’s incredible cool. Mathematica, Framemaker, gnuplot, LaTeX, dot/graphviz, elm, pine, tr, tin, all that.