At my house we've noticed that the music at the beginning and end of the shows and before advertisements seems substantially louder than the audio of the show itself. My assumption was that this was real and was an attempt to somehow skirt the intent of the CALM Act without actually breaking the law.

Yea! An useful response!

I worked on the 3M Color Workstation in 1985 (I think). It used custom graphics processing hardware from a company out of Pasadena. I forget their name. It predated PS and was totally crushed once Photoshop added color support. I remember the laser scanner and workstations looking a lot like the ones in the video.

I definitely noticed this performance hit. I use POP for several accounts, one of which holds over 100,000 emails. Once I archived the bulk of them using Thunderbird's archive, the indexing penalty seemed to disappear completely. Now, I still have access to the archive for searching, but since it doesn't change, there's no new indexing done on it.