> The social reason is that we had to save every cycle we could, because if the job didn’t finish fast it might not finish at all and you never know when you’re getting bumped off the hardware because the President of IBM just called and fuck your thesis, it’s yacht-racing time.

I don't buy it. Wouldn't people want their programs to run fast regardless of this?

In C arrays are given an offset to the pointer, not an index, that is why they start at 0.