A key thing to remember is that 32k of RAM isn't the only memory available; often there was all sorts of longer term storage, and in many cases the data for a j

A key thing to remember is that 32k of RAM isn't the only memory available; often there was all sorts of longer term storage, and in many cases the data for a job was separate than the machine running the program, which could feed that data in using a number of methods. Today's programs load entire files into RAM because it's available; back then you might load a single record from the file at a time, and there were routines to seek through the offline data (subject to optimization) and manage the working memory more effectively. It's also worth remembering that, at the time, a machine with 32k of RAM was one of the most powerful on the market, was still considerably expensive, and the alternative was paying (a team of) humans to do the work by hand. For all its shortcomings and the insane complexity required to get the machines to work properly, they were generally much faster than humans performing the same task and generally (assuming they were programmed correctly) could be relied on to make fewer mistakes. Their utility was remarkable, especially their ability to perform arithmetic very quickly, which was (and still is) quite tedious to perform by hand.