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One of the nicest things about finding old papers is that often the "unworkable" technique now fits in L1 or L2 cache.

Or that RAM is practically endless now. I still remember when I was reading an old pattern recognition paper and they dismissed one simple, elegant solution as "obviously impossible" because they estimated it would need 10485760 KB of RAM. We then bought a server with 128 GB of RAM and shipped their impossible approach in production :) where it's been running nicely for 9 years now.

Nice, hope you let them know.

Is there a name for this phenomenon, where with limited resources humans get more creative? There are still some astonishing technologies that are ongoing today, but much more limited to the early era of computer science.

Limitivity

Worse computers require better programmers.

Could you please share the paper reference? Thank you.