Both, from the Spectrum days up to the time we could get them to run on 32 bits.
On those days I and many older than me were still writing business applications in Assembly. Compilers for higher level languages were constrained in what they could achieve in the amount of memory that was available.
And Ada did required lots of it. Funny enough I would bet modern Ada compilers are less resource intensive than C++ ones.
Could you elaborate? Are you thinking 80s home computers like the Amiga 1000, or more classical PCs?