I have an eMac I bought in 2004. I just used the system restore CD to re-install Panther, iLife '04, Internet Explorer for Mac(!), etc. I don't have any timed specs from "back then", so I can't answer this definitively, but the machine feels slower than I remember it feeling back in the good old days.

![This is derived from this photo taken by Jari Soikkeli and posted on Flickr under the CC-BY-2.0 license](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1QUZR.jpg)

If my hard drive has been purged of all the cruft that accumulates over time, should the computer run as snappily as it did when it was new? Are perceived differences in speed due psychological, to comparisons to more modern hardware, or do systems slow as they age for reasons (physical degradation?) other than the accumulation of contents on the system drive?