Wow, I remember the Pentium 90s coming out and being amazed. I of course had rubbish old late 1980s British computers to use whilst everyone else was on 16 bit machines, but when the Pentium II came out, I finally got hold of a 486 DX2 66Mhz.
It is strange how you learn to "make do" with hardware and systems, and learn patience. I finally bought an Ivybridge i7 last year after "making do" with machines for a long time. I fondly remember spending hours and hours tinkering with slow systems, but being just as productive!
There are times when you need to have high CPU performance, but the reality is that all semi-current machines are amazingly fast and capable of productive work.