Three other things to think about: 1980s memory models especially dos-era PC was a nightmare but you could at great effort work around it. The C / unix memory

Three other things to think about: 1980s memory models especially dos-era PC was a nightmare but you could at great effort work around it. The C / unix memory model is actually quite luxurious compared to programming on dos 3.3. In the old days non-English support was pretty complicated. Now you rely on the OS to support UTF-8 and call it good, more or less. Was a bigger problem 'back in the day'. In the old days you'd run a spell checker as a batch process, possibly not even part of the editor itself. The point I'm making is WRT speed, now a days speed doesn't matter, not because processors are faster (although they are, software always expands faster than hardware) but because we have integrated app with threading, so instead of saving this into a file, then exiting my browser and running a separate spell check app then exit and start the browser again and load this file back into it, the browser simply has a thread doing spell checking "on the fly". So in the old days it was VERY important WRT labor costs to spell check a 10000 word essay as fast as possible, and on a 8 mhz XT that was a trick indeed. But today my multi core multi ghz desktop merely needs to spell check on the fly as I'm typing and I can't be faster than 100 wpm or so. My desktop had "like one second or so" to decide that ghz and mhz are not words and put red squigglies under them whereas in the old days you'd have to spell check like 1000 words/second to keep the users happy. So simple ineffective code survives in 2023 because it can lean on the OS, its not just that hardware is faster or larger.