This fad was also helped, I think, by the memory architectures of the day. Without modern multilevel caches and ridiculously expensive cache misses, it might ha

This fad was also helped, I think, by the memory architectures of the day. Without modern multilevel caches and ridiculously expensive cache misses, it might have seemed reasonable to converge on a one-size-fits-all structure. The cost of jumping around a relatively compact structure like a hash table probably seemed immaterial at the time.