I really like the idea of running, optimizing my software on old hardware, because you can viscerally feel when things are slower (or faster!). The most obvious way to do this is to buy an old system and literally use it for development, but that would allow down my IDE, and compiler and all other development tasks, which is less helpful, and (possibly) unnecessary.
I want to be able to:
- Run my application at various levels of performance, on demand
- At the same time, run my IDE, debugger, compiler at full speed
- On a single system
Nice to have:
- Simulate real, specific old systems, with some accuracy
- Similarly throttle memory speed, and size
- Optionally run my build system slowly