I started learning to code as a kid in the 80s on 8-bit machines. Seemed like there was rapid progress in the availability of CPU power, RAM, etc., up until the early 2000s and then things seemed to... slow down.
Which is about the time everybody started to focus hard on horizontal scalability.
My first paid job was in the late 80's. I had to do something about a system that was basically a lot of menus written in Oracle Forms running in terminals on SCO Unix or maybe Xenix.
I was unbearable slow. Users had to wait 5+ seconds every time they pressed a key. And it was a nightmare to try to optimize it. But then I scrapped it and rewrote the whole thing using plain C and curses and system() calls to do the actual work. Hard-coding the menu hierarchy structure which nobody was changing anyway. That made the system very fast. The company was very surprised that navigating menus could be so fast.
Google Docs isn't the product. It's free. You're the product. And it only needs to be good enough to keep competitors from creating something so great that it removes their first-mover advantage. It's clear that Google has given up developing new features for it.
[ADDED: And as other have mentioned while the collaborative editing of Google Docs doesn't scale all that well, it's a great remote collaboration tool. Never want to go back to sending docs around.]
I actually never much cared for WordPerfect with all its formatting codes and so forth. I was actually a bigger fan of early DOS-based Microsoft Word at the time.
We never went past 64 bits because it's enough bits to address memory for the foreseeable future, and applications needing more are rare. It's mostly cryptography.