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Pitting a Mac Plus Against an AMD Dual Core
In the Age of Computer Bloat someone has decided to do a performance comparison between a 1986 Mac Plus and a 2007 AMD Dual core, each running appropriate software. Computer Bloat does not fare so well. "In order to keep the hoots and hollers of 'unfair comparison' at a minimum, we designed the tests to be as fair and equitable as possible. We focussed on running tests that reflect how the user perceives the computing experience... And no, we didn't include processing-heavy modern software like Photoshop or Crysis! We selected very basic everyday functions that were performed equally by the 1980's and the 2007 Microsoft applications."
TCP/IP is not exactly a complicated set of protocols. Ancient machines can and did easily handle it.
It ignores other factors such as relative price. Of course the server is apparently being run on a Mac plus so I can't go back and check the article to see if they listed the specs of the current PC, but a Mac Plus cost about $2500 when it was introduced. Now, take $2500 in 1986 dollars and you get about $4500 in today's dollars. Well, $4500 buys you a shitload of computer. You can get a much better processor than they had, 4GB of RAM, a hardware RAID controller with a bunch of disks and so on. Load up something like that and see what your launch times are like. Given that the system they are using probably is less than $2000 in today's dollars, you aren't even close money wise.
However as you said, it doesn't really matter as the computers are performing on totally different levels. In every way a new system does more than a Mac Plus. Even if you dismiss the usefulness of multi-tasking and look at just the app there's huge improvements. One would be the in-line spell checker. As I'm sure this post is revealing I'm a horrible speller. However in Word it is great, it will check spelling as I go along. After a few times of correcting the same mistake, it just starts auto correcting. It gets to the point where once I've trained a copy I can type a document and it is good to go as it has fixed all the problems.
This is just another example of the great Benjamin Disraeli quote: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Or in other words, you can twist around a test in almost any way you like to make it come out with a result that you want. However that doesn't mean that it has any relevance.