Well, I guess we're only going to invent the microchip once.

In any case now that I'm... you know, not a kid and can look at 90s tech with some historical data, it wasn't quite as straightforward as we remember. But then it also didn't have memory prices spiking by 300% overnight because everybody knows a fake AI bubble is going to pop so they want to sell them a bunch of crap before all the money evaporates but not ramp up production because that money is clearly going to evaporate.

That's 21st century through and through. 20th century tech would just keep slapping the same Z80 and Motorola 68000 chips on things for a decade. Z80 too slow as your CPU? Maybe it can be your sound chip now. Listen, we have warehouses of these, we'll keep selling you new ones well into the 2000s, it's barely a clump of wires held together with chewing gum.

Did you know the 68000 was 10 years old by the time it made it to the Genesis/Megadrive as a CPU? That'd be like the PS5 launching with a single core 2GHz Athlon from 2005. I didn't know that as a kid.