That's a poor comparison. The difference between back then and now is: Back then, no one knew we'd have such an exponential increase in computing power. But we

That's a poor comparison. The difference between back then and now is: Back then, no one knew we'd have such an exponential increase in computing power. But we got it. Today, everyone expects that tomorrow will yield an exponential increase in computing power, because that's the way its always been. But that increase isn't coming. In other words, products back then were never engineered with that exponential increase in mind. Often it just happened, accidentally or because the creators had a large vision that genuinely needed that much memory. Products today, like browser rendering runtimes and by extension Atom, literally are. The problem with writing code engineered ideally for the computers of tomorrow is that, in the realest sense of the word, tomorrow never comes. Today, its "32gb of memory is expensive and rare, but it'll get cheaper." You keep that product development mindset and tomorrow it'll be "64gb of memory is expensive, but it'll get cheaper." Your product will always be slow. Tomorrow never comes. And it'll take teams like the Chrome team far too long to realize that we're fucking done with exponential increases at an industry level. They're over. Maybe in twenty years we'll get a revolution like memristors or graphene or something, but that shit is not going to be soon. The backend engineering world has already figured this out and moved hard to scale-out instead of scale-up, but the UI world is still caught-up in this pretty little fantasy that, well, you know, the next iPhone will have 6gb of memory so it'll just be a little slow until then.