So many people assume that everything that came before they were at school was primitive, and barely chugged along :)

A little reading shows the opposite. Most of our smart ideas were already used in 1940s/50s/60s computers, and are recycled on our fab new chips!! Pipelining, out of order exec, multiple cores, etc.

That old-time hardware might have been a bit "chunky" but the architectures used some very smart techniques.