My view is that mainly because of so many different countries in Europe it was much more interesting to see what someone across the border could do and it was kind of a healthy competition and interestingly it was never based on nationalism, but on simple human difference of perspectives. It was a pure art, expression not motivated by money but from the will to create and impress. To push computers of the time to their limits, create something thought to be impossible. I wish these principles were applied in modern software development. For example why do we need few GHz CPU and GBs of RAM to run a text editor?