80s software was probably 10e5 times as efficient in terms of resources used per unit of functionality. Most of the resources used today are for encode/decode

80s software was probably 10e5 times as efficient in terms of resources used per unit of functionality. Most of the resources used today are for encode/decode (aka marshall/unmarshall), remote procedure calls (e.g. REST APIs), remote storage (API to DB writes), type checking and inefficient data structures and algos. In short, devs are lazy and the toolkits are sloppy . 100s of MB of code, RPCs , huge DOM manipulations , 100MB of ram just to run a basic CRUD app. It's 85% of the modern software experience. similar crud app in the 80s/90s would take kBs of code & ram, 5ms UI latency, with deferred or no remote calls.