> Working within constraints teaches you something, I think.

It absolutely does. But every system has constraints; even when provided with massive resources, humans tend to try things that exceed those resources, as evidenced by Parkinson's Law of data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

It was worse than you remember. You could have 640x256 in monochrome, or 320x256 with 4 colours, or 160x256 with 16 colours (which IIRC was actually 8 distinct colours plus 8 flashing versions of them).

The game Elite did something extremely evil and clever: it was actually able to switch between modes partway through each frame, so that it could display higher-resolution wireframe graphics in the upper part of the screen and lower-resolution more-colourful stuff for the radar/status display further down.

I hear you, having learned programming on a machine even more constrained by the BBC Micro. But learners today are more likely to "Siri, build me a Hangman app."

I’m waiting for somebody to come and tell us about the time they punched cards by hand, one hole at the time, and then threw coal in the furnace to have the cards interpreted by a steam-powered computer.