&gt;Reading up on the capabilities of early mainframes is eye-opening if you (like me) grew up on Pentiums.<p>Close enough... I grew up on XTs, i286, i386, so on :) All of them way weaker than my phone (Not sure if that was what you were referring to).<p>However, in terms of architecture, algorithms, programming language features... It feels like we haven&#x27;t advanced too much. Actually, the opposite... we are encourage now to do not be too clever on programming because processing power and memory usage is close to be a commodity and clean code is more important (which is fine but less fun).