Honestly, the world was simpler then (with fewer layers of abstraction separating the database from the presentation) and I suspect the majority of the time it

Honestly, the world was simpler then (with fewer layers of abstraction separating the database from the presentation) and I suspect the majority of the time it was far more efficient then than now. ... speaking as someone who was in the job of enterprise BI where data sources were primarily Progress databases on AS400, back from around 2000-2010, when we finally migrated to a Linux / PostgreSQL stack.