You don’t even need higher level tasks like that: take something as seemingly simple as processing text. That used to be 8 byte operations, display was looking up a bitmap and copying it into a buffer, but once programmers accepted that humans use more than ASCII and want nice displays that started to involve context sensitive decoding and display, processing vectors, subpixel rendering, etc. All great improvements but most of them require more CPU/RAM than a 30 year old computer had, too.