The first time I head sampled digital audio on a computer was on a Sun 3 workstation circa 1990 which had a high end 68k micro processor. It was a clip from "Layla" by Derek and the Dominoes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TngViNw2pOo
which is featured in this television commercial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eGWW8KOQio
and got somebody in the computer lab to ask "Hey man, is that Freedom Rock?"
The thing was that computer progress was frozen in midair for a time in the early 1980s; computers like the TRS-80, Apple ][, C-64 and game consoles like the Atari 2600 all outlasted the projections of their makers because all of the parts from software to the CPU to video system (e.g. the CPU clock was usually slaved to the video refresh of NTSC television) were tightly coupled and making any substantial improvements would mean dumping everything and starting over, particularly with all new software because you didn't have real operating systems back then.
It was by the late 1980s, when the PC AT clones were established that you could really buy a computer one year that was a lot better than last year's model because architectures had advanced to the point where they could do that and keep compatibility.
So processing PCM audio went from impossible to difficult to easy to trivial and video was not far behind.
The free ride of clock rates going up and power consumption going down didn't stop until 2005, but each die shrink kept resulting in cheaper transistors until... just about now. It's not accidental at all that enthusiasts are complaining that NVIDIA 40-series GPUs aren't more cost effective than 30-series GPUs or simply greed; the economic engine of Moore's Law is dead, international competition and dirigisme might lead to another generation or two more than the free market would have delivered on its own. We've had a long time of getting better performance through more cores, wider SIMD, specialized architectures, etc. but it's going to take something big like true 3-d integration, semiconductors past silicon, or superconducting logic gates for performance to improve... Or maybe the revolution will be in "doing more with less".