it's hard to imagine the kind of performance it was able to squeeze out of that hardware
No no no, you have it backwards. It's hard to imagine what a "modern" OS (Windows, Linux, OSX) is actually doing with all those CPU cycles, that it can't do stuff like this even with >10x the compute power.
What are you talking about? A desktop today has no problem playing two dozen low-bitrate mp3s from disk, streaming a dozen movie trailers from youtube at 240p, playing WoW, and talking on Skype at the same time.
Now if you try to do that with only itunes or windows media player or equivalent "monolithic" player, you'll probably run into some slowdown, but only because those are designed to maximize the experience for one single piece of media at a time. Something like media player classic would do it in a heartbeat though.
No no no, you have it backwards. It's hard to imagine what a "modern" OS (Windows, Linux, OSX) is actually doing with all those CPU cycles, that it can't do stuff like this even with >10x the compute power.