I was working on one project, doing OLAP with Essbase in the late 90s. I had just bought a new PC at home a Pentium II/400 with 16MB RAM.
At work we had an HP ProLiant server with dual Pentium Pro processors. Recalculating the OLAP cube on that took over 4 hours. In the end, it was quicker to export the bottom row data, save it to a ZIP disk, drive an hour home, load it up on my machine, re-calculate the data, export everything, drive back to the office and re-load the cube!
The Zip disk proved very useful, and I luckily never suffered from the click-of-death with my drives (external parallel and internal IDE)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
