Merry Christmas!!
Q: ...you mean computer imagery was still based on the paradigm that the world was flat? Even into the 21st century??? Talk about doing something the hard way!
A: Yep! Back then people would render simple shapes with complex meshes of thousands of flat little triangles. Next to the bottleneck processors they used, it's the main reason why their computers were so slow. In the last days of the religious atmosphere of centralization and trade, corporate dogmas had people believing that flat was faster.