Also, paradoxically, limitations make for more creativity.
While I get your arguments, they are just fallacious.
You can perfectly limit the palette you'll use for your CGs on a modern computer. You can perfectly limit yourself in terms of memory use. You can perfectly optimize your code while still having 8 cores at your disposition, and you can even decide that you'll not go further than a given CPU charge.
And yes, doing so with modern computers can effectively force you to be more creative. But doing it directly with the material of those time will never have a positive impact on your creativity. It will force you to be smarter, but never more creative than you could be with modern computers, even with all the restriction I listed above.
Creativity don't come from limitations, but from yourself, and only from yourself. If you're smart and creative enough to make something innovative with 30 years old technologies, then you're also smart and creative enough to make something even more innovative with nowadays technologies. It's a question of will, not a question of obligations.
At the opposite, if you need those limitations to effectively be creative, then it's not creativity, but adaptability. You haven't done something new, you've done differently something that you already had in mind, or that already exist.
Before it became the name of a rootkit in 2018, LoJax was the generic name used for all the solutions offering Ajax support to browsers without the XMLHttpRequest object.
Was it creative ? Not really. It was possible to do this since a decade (just use the DOM to add/change a
script tag) but nobody thought about it before Ajax appeared. They just adapted the creativity of someone else.
Was it less a "horrible spaghetti code" ? Not at all, it was the opposite. Since you had a really limited range of possibilities, you needed to add tons of safeguards and watchdogs in order to ensure that everything was under control.
Was it really used ? Not outside of pure tech demos.
And I said this as someone who was part of the CPC demo scene in the 80's. Therefore as someone who know what counting the number of ticks of your code, and the number of bytes of your files, while still trying to be more creative that the others, really mean and imply. Someone who know that each advance made by the technology made me more creative than I ever was previously, because it always opened new opportunities, new ways to play with what I have at hand.
Would I be able to do amazing things if I had to make a CPC demo today (assuming that I remember how to do it) ? Without a single doubt the answer is yes.
Would this be creativity ? No, I would just try my best to adapt what I now know possible because I've seen it done, or did it myself, with more modern technologies.
Would this be better than what I could do in the same number of ticks and memory use on a modern computer ? Absolutely not, because nowadays CPUs (and so ASM languages) include instructions that do on two/three ticks what needed at least ten ticks in the past. This while compiled, and even interpreted, languages are more optimized, partly because of the extensions of CPU instructions. And also because we now have the GPU, that will let you have, in few ticks, amazing effects that wouldn't even be possible in a single refreshing cycle of the screens of those days.
