no offense after 35 years working in computers this is an idiotic comparison I worked on a lot of those old systems they were optimized for what they did...
The majority of the power used in the newer computers is used in display graphics, and grotesquely bloated operating systems and applications that are convoluted kludgy mashups of other other convoluted kludgy mashups
You rarely see the elegance of tight simple code for a given task anymore ...
programmers, do the abundance of system resources, have become lazy wasteful gluttons of system resources
>>You rarely see the elegance of tight simple code for a given task anymore ...
Because we don’t have to waste money writing tight simple code for a given task anymore. We don’t have to build a specialized computer that is optimized for a limited range of functions. I can buy a $1000 computer and add some of that “kludgy mashup” software and use it to play a game, write a letter, surf the web, control a power plant, sequence a gene, etc and I can do that without changing anything.
While that is basically true, it is all about cost. Using more hardware resources for quickly written code is cheaper overall than more efficient code in lower resource hardware in most cases.