I’ve tried writing code on a 486dx, which I believe is a contemporary CPU for that era. It’s not necessarily that nobody could come up with anything like this,

I’ve tried writing code on a 486dx, which I believe is a contemporary CPU for that era. It’s not necessarily that nobody could come up with anything like this, it’s more impressive to me that it was basically already there for a lot of these things, in an environment that is, well, to be honest, quite difficult to eek good performance out of. (And of course, heavily limited in memory. With toolchains and development environments that are constrained similarly.)