In 1997 or 1998, I had a 486, and to play an MP3 (which of course took hours to download), I'd have to exit out of Windows into DOS and do literally NOTHING else but play the command line mp3 playback app I found.
In 1997 or 1998, I had a 486 and to play an MP3 (which of course took many minutes to download), I'd just type "xmms filename" at my zsh prompt running inside Red Hat. While it was playing, I'd carry on working in Emacs or a browser or both.
