No, we were as smart (if not smarter) in the 1970's but memory was WAY more expensive and the 64 KB the thing uses didn't even exit. Thus, all focus was on get

No, we were as smart (if not smarter) in the 1970's but memory was WAY more expensive and the 64 KB the thing uses didn't even exit. Thus, all focus was on getting the most amount of performance out of the fewest bits. There are plenty of new TTL design like the above that conveniently doesn't work with original constraints.