As I said, I've been out of the loop awhile so thanks for the update. I still think, however, that general number-crunching is probably a better description of what was being done back then rather the very specialized parallel processing that GPUs are used for nowadays. But think of the GUI they could have had with 2 machines -- one for the content and one for the presentation.

I've been away from the scene from awhile but can someone tell me which phone is capable of performing 160 million Floating Point Operations per second? At 6 clock cycles per Floating Point Instruction (which I really doubt), that would be running at a clock rate of 1GHz. I recall that even NOP (No Operation) instructions take a clock or two to execute which is why they used to be (still are?) used in some timing loops. Even with pipelining that advances every clock cycle, I find it hard to believe that 355.0/113.0 done out to 6 or 10 digits of (equivalent) precision can be done 160 Million times per second. I can see a phone micro maybe handling 160MIPS (Instructions Per Second), but not floating point.

It also promotes better music because when the consumer has better choice, they will choose better music.

I got out of the retail record business over 25 years ago because the industry was rapidly losing its customers to consumers. They weren't choosing better music; they were choosing cheaper music. Saving 50 cents on Saturday Night Fever was more important than their store actually having a wide selection of interesting sounds. Eventually, it wasn't worth it to stock the better; only the popular.

I blame the Decline of Western Civilization on the Rise of the Consumer. YMMV.

The title of this article is redundant.