[wruza]

Numerous examples in early digital era as well, see e.g. fast inverse square root, cga color hacks (also entire demoscene) and endless tricks in software that has been outrunning hardware for a while.

Later these were declared wrong, considered harmful, having bad smell, not passing code review and it all became a boring task of combining lego blocks. Sure these analog guys had insane tricks in their sleeves, but our “collective industry” would probably stigmatize them immediately if met today.

[eru]

Different circumstances call for different trade-offs.

[devmor]

Exactly. Their era called for getting things done no matter how. Our era calls for iterability.