@cstanhope relative to the main computer's CPU peripherals have gotten dumber. Like, Commodore put 6502s in their peripherals and Coleco put 6801s in theirs. Processing power on the same order of magnitude as the main CPU.
Can you imagine a hard drive with like a 64 bit 4 core hyperthreading CPU and a gig of RAM all to itself on today's computer? That's what it would be like relatively speaking lol. Anyways it would be fun to herd a bunch of microcontrollers into a cohesive system.