[guenthert]

> Overall, this approach was more reliable, because there were no risks of exceeding the memory limits, but it was much more tedious for the programmer, because the worst cases for memory usage had to be accurately predicted.

Well, most importantly, it fixated the program's limits. Got a bigger machine and wanted to tackle greater data-sets? You're out of luck, if you didn't have the source code. Old Unix programs were often like that. It were the GNU counterparts which often did away with such arbitrary limits allowing systems to grow and the software to stay relevant.