Would you have called the 8088 retro in 1997? Because a '79 vintage 8088 in '97 would be more recent than that '97 machine is now.
But even a few short years later everyone was on Windows 98SE or XP and the DOS machines began to look seriously retro.
In that case, the distance from 1979 to 1997 is much longer than 1997 to 2022.
Then in the late 90s I remember RAM doubling every year.
From about 2010 onwards, things have gotten slower.
The time between the 8088, 286, 386, 486, Pentium spans nearly two decades.
Now intel churns out a dozen new SKUs a year. Granted they are all variations on the same silicon as the process improves, but it is far more accelerated than in the past.