Intermediate point of reference: Crash Bandicoot, which came out at the end of 1996 and ran on the original PlayStation, used 2MB of RAM and a 33Mhz processor.

Intermediate point of reference: Crash Bandicoot, which came out at the end of 1996 and ran on the original PlayStation, used 2MB of RAM and a 33Mhz processor. As in Defender, there was no operating system to speak of, and though Sony "required" developers to use libraries, we ignored that dictum and coded the rendering pipeline in R3000 assembly. We could render about 1000 polygons per frame, 30 frames per second. Now I have to work similarly hard just to get IE8's crappy JavaScript implementation to sort 1000 objects in under 33ms on a 3GHz machine. Sigh. For even more extreme examples of performance within confines, see the excellent chronicle of Atari 2600 development, "Racing the Beam".