My first true computer, a TI 99/4a (which I talk about also in a previous entry), had 16 or 48 KB of RAM, depending whether or not you had one of the memory expansion cartridges, and that limited quantity of memory severely curbed the complexity of the programs one could write on the machine. However, the limited complexity of the programs, the relative crudeness of the development environment (a BASIC shell) and the slow execution speeds weren’t very obvious to me back then. They were somewhat mitigated by the novelty of the computer itself as a machine, and by the perpetual intense excitement of discovery. The arduous design of programs to save memory, fit more graphics or more code, or even getting our programs to work at all was less about constraints than challenge.
The same kind of constraints—or challenge—followed me over the years as I moved on to different computers. Despite their being more powerful, both faster and sporting more memory, the challenge remained there because while the computers got better, so did I at programming. I kept asking more out of the machine, writing increasingly complex programs needing either more memory or more speed, often both. That meant better algorithms, better data structures, and better implementations1.
Posted by Steven Pigeon 
