Subroutine calls in the ancient world, before computers had stacks or heaps

Note that before we had arbitrarily extensible heaps, programmers always did at least a little engineering, in that they had to consider the probable distribution of inputs and size* all their intermediate storage appropriately.

* giving rise to "BUGS AND LIMITATIONS"

Those before times are still today, depending on what you're doing. For hard real-time, dynamic memory is (almost) never used, mostly because the time needed to alloc/free memory isn't deterministic. So everything is statically allocated at compile time and yeah, you've got to know how much memory your inputs are going to consume.

But knowing the bounds of memory consumption used to be normal for application programmers, too. I mean, you don't want to run out of memory. Ever. What do people do now, just YOLO memory usage?

I really liked the Art of Computer Programming with regards to this subject.

While seemingly obsolete, there are a ton of pre-heap / pre-stack algorithms for dynamically changing arrays or other data structures.

The book also builds up to garbage collection and how to implements Lisp-lists. The kind of encyclopedic knowledge you'd expect from Knuth.

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One of my favorites is how to have two Arrays dynamically take up one space.

Have one array grow normally from location#0, and the second array grow backwards from location#End.

Now both arrays take up the statically allocated space efficiently sharing.

This can be extended to an arbitrary number of arrays, but at that point you might as well use Malloc and Realloc. Or at least, the techniques therein are really close to a malloc-like routine IMO.

Me too clicked the link expecting stories of heap and stack uses before computers.

Yeah, I was all ready to learn about how the ancient Egyptians used stacks to build the pyramids or something.