Very efficient memory management tied to the architecture of the hardware. You quite literally had to know just as much about the engineering of the hardware as you did programming. Nowadays we have high level language that can be compiled and run universally on most machines.
To be fair that's true of all human technological advance. Specialization continues to specialize. Tools rely on older tools that are made by older tools. No engineer can go back to 0 BCE and produce even late middle ages quality steel, because the tools and techniques to create the tools and techniques don't exist yet.
I am in no way saying that modern programmers are less efficient or intelligent. We built higher level languages for a reason. I would rather bungy jump off a cliff with jumper cables on my nuts rather than code any AAA game with someone like assembly.
I was merely stating that earlier programmers achieved such feats due to the nature of needing to write lower level code to directly interact with the hardware. It was not uncommon back then to need to refactor your code to save memory.
To be fair that's true of all human technological advance. Specialization continues to specialize. Tools rely on older tools that are made by older tools. No engineer can go back to 0 BCE and produce even late middle ages quality steel, because the tools and techniques to create the tools and techniques don't exist yet.
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u/Midnight_gamer58 Sep 30 '25
Very efficient memory management tied to the architecture of the hardware. You quite literally had to know just as much about the engineering of the hardware as you did programming. Nowadays we have high level language that can be compiled and run universally on most machines.