[linuxrebe1]

I would agree, I would also add that generally programmers today are not used to dealing with the memory limits of '80s computers. What is now considered an embedded device, back then was a desktop. My smartwatch likely has more memory than a PC Jr.

[fragmede]

No idea what smart watch you have but the latest (series 9) Apple Watch has (up to) 2 GB of RAM and 5 Tflop of computing power, while the PC junior had 256 kilobytes of ram and .33 megaflops of computing.

nodejs' main binary on my laptop is 44 MiB.

The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) we put a man on the Moon with could do 4 kilo instructions per second and 0.43 megaflops and had 2KB of RAM. Apple watch is roughly 900x as fast as the AGC while being being .67 x as large and less than 1% of the weight.

Vs the PC Jr, it's almost 2000x the size of an Apple watch and like 150x heavier.

[The_Colonel]

That's a huge understatement. Galaxy Watch 7 has 5 cores, one of them 1.6 GHz A78 and 2 GB RAM.

In 2013 I bought Galaxy Gear which was one of the first smartwatches and even that one had 512 MB RAM. PC Jr. had a 64 KB RAM base in comparison.

[Ekaros]

ESP32 has more memory and more ROM than 5,25" disk... Not to even talk about clock speed...

And that is considered very affordable chip.

[M95D]

And yet, with today's CS, ESP32 can't do what a 8086 could do back then.

[sifar]

is it that it cannot do or that it is not the priority ?

[M95D]

Isn't it the same thing? CS has other priorities. Answer to the original question is "No, early 80s computers could not have had better software, because today's CS focuses on SaaS income, tracking users and having the tallest Jenga tower of dependencies."