Imagine telling a 1981 programmer who was fitting an entire chess engine into 1KB RAM that 40 years in the future every application will ship with its own 250MB operating system to run in a container orchestrator which is running in a virtual machine.

At least we did something useful with Moore’s Law.

A little while ago in a retrogaming community, someone asked why Atari 2600 games always ran at 60fps when even NES games sometimes had slowdown. It was explained that the video system in the 2600 isn’t independent of the main CPU as it is in other consoles, so if the game program doesn’t keep updating the display with correct timing, it gets scrambled.

Truly no choice!

Its funny how this essentially sounds like conservatice economic analysis if you change a few words

Software obesity. It’s a thing.

it is the year 3276

the computer clock only ticks up 1 second every 3 seconds

This is nonsense. Old software was not fast. Computers used to take minutes to start up. That’s not an exaggeration. MS Word could easily take 30 seconds to open.

Obviously if you run it on modern hardware it’s going to be lightning fast, but not because the authors cared more about performance and efficiency than we do now.