Trip down the memory lane, or My, it was such a short time ago!

While reading BBC feed I came upon this bit of nostalgia. While my firs very own computer was not a ZX81, I do remember the spawn of Sir Clive Sinclair quite fondly. Mine was a Soviet copy of ZX Spectrum with whopping 48 kilobytes of RAM. As my only tape recorder had that annoying Dolby noise reduction you can't turn off, I was deprived of any way to save anything, but it never stopped me from learning some Z80 assembly and trying to connect floppy drive to it and playing games... I even modified my B&W TV set (year 1976 vintage vacuum tube job, with a circuit diagram the size of my room) to accept composite video input. And reading that article made me wonder...

But using computers nowadays is a totally different experience. Where old software was streamlined out of necessity (you had to write it that way - 48K is not much), modern software is bloated without the need to be that way. Seems to me that the usual solution for the lack of processing power is now just adding more memory/processors/clusters or whatever... getting basically the same result as you'd get ten years before. Mass production have killed common sense, it seems to me.