Back then, programmers had to care about performance. The field of programming was less accessible, so the average skills to reach the barrier to entry were hig

Back then, programmers had to care about performance. The field of programming was less accessible, so the average skills to reach the barrier to entry were higher. So people were, on average, better programmers. The commercial incentives of today to reach market with something half-assed and then never fix it don’t help. In 2002 I ran OpenBSD on my laptop (thus sacrificing wifi). The memory footprint of running X11, a browser, a terminal, and an editor: 28MB