[dragontamer]

8051 C Programmers remember their 8-bit stack pointer (256 words of stack space).

Enough for C to work out in most programs. Modern x86 systems have 64kB of L1 cache and 2MB of L3 cache to work with. Modern systems have more cache than the amount of full-RAM early systems had...

[vardump]

8051 programmers would love to have 256 bytes of stack (8051 word is byte). But because IRAM is needed for register banks (8-32 bytes, depending on how many you use), C library temporaries etc. you're really left with just 40-100 bytes of stack.