What's the point of articles like this? I see them crop up all the time where someone from the future looks back on some distant past WAY out of context, and says things like "This was INSANE!" "Who would ever design something like this!?" "Look at how much smarter this other idea would have been!". It's not constructive or interesting.

The answer is universally this: whoever designed <thing> at the time couldn't even fathom <modern thing>, and didn't need to fathom <modern thing> while they were designing <thing>. What they did at the time made perfect sense for the constraints they were aware of.