Don't take Pournelle too seriously. This is the man who predicted that the
S-100 bus was the wave of the future (the IBM-PC was too clumsy and slow,
you see). And he criticizes the A2000 with bridgeboard because it "runs
programs only as fast as a plain-vanilla IBM PC" and yet praises the
Atari's pc-ditto as a great hack and very useful — while admitting that it
"runs programs at 80% of the speed of the original IBM PC." Go figure!