>Moore's law quickly made those compromises obsolete. Your overall argument is perfect, but I'd question the use of "quickly" since people were selling essenti

>Moore's law quickly made those compromises obsolete. Your overall argument is perfect, but I'd question the use of "quickly" since people were selling essentially 6502-based stuff for how long, 20 years at least? From the Apple II in 1977 to the SNES which was released in 1990 and still getting games in 1995, so that's 18 years of that CPU being highly relevant and worth learning. Of course, you're 100% right that, assuming money was no object and you could buy and use whatever hardware you wanted to, it wasn't long before you could escape those compromises since the x86 and the 68000 (and probably others I don't know) brought much better architectures to those who could afford them.