AFAIK, oldest popular art would be the 1964 CDC 6600 and it's peripheral processors, designed around the idea that memory speed >> cpu speed (at the time, true)

AFAIK, oldest popular art would be the 1964 CDC 6600 and it's peripheral processors, designed around the idea that memory speed >> cpu speed (at the time, true). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6600 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6600 An electrical engineer looks at a computer design and says "If only we had faster switching transistors!" A computer scientist looks at a computer design and says "If only my compiler could optimize code better!" A computer engineer looks at state of the art across the board and says "This architecture will allow us to maximize performance with currently available components." If networking or IO is being held back by the CPU (or vice versus)... there's performance to be gained by doing things differently.