To the point of this thread, it wasn't "bad" then, any more than Newton's ideas about satellites were bad. It was state of the art, and had room for improvement over time.
Fair point; that was some clumsy phrasing on my part. By the same standard even our best code is bad today in some way, I'm sure. (If only for being more verbose and overspecified than "CodeAI, write an optimized routine to losslessly compress video".)
To the point of this thread, it wasn't "bad" then, any more than Newton's ideas about satellites were bad. It was state of the art, and had room for improvement over time.