The difference is worlds apart. It still amazes me how long Cinepak takes to compress, I have an old book called "How to digitise video" which is a really fun read, and talks about leaving your computer on overnight to compress a few minutes of Cinepak video.
Of course, decoding wise, Cinepak uses a billion times less CPU than DivX, so it's obvious that processing power is what has allowed these new codecs to do what they do more than just more advanced compression techniques.
Well it's a fun to trip down memory lane. Sadly since VirtualDub doesn't support arbitrary framerate changing (yet!), I can't make them the nice sloppy 15 fps that would really make them seem oldschool. I do have a copy of 16-bit VidEdit somewhere though...
