>In the 90s programmers didn't have that luxury, all hardware was the same I mostly agree with you. However, the 90s was actually a period where computer hardw

>In the 90s programmers didn't have that luxury, all hardware was the same I mostly agree with you. However, the 90s was actually a period where computer hardware became rapidly obsolescent. The 486 to Pentium transition, for example, meant that lots of people had PCs far less powerful than the PCs used by games developers. Quake is a case in point. Quake came out in 1996 and would not have run on a typical PC bought only two or three years earlier. A few years after that, many games would only run acceptably on PCs with 3D graphics cards (which were by no means universal).