Reminds me of the first time I saw Sin and Cos lookup tables being used in early 3D gaming. The computers could calculate those just fine, especially with a math co-processor. But for 3D gaming it would be too slow to get a good framerate. So lookup tables were used to greatly improve the speed.

Back on those days all sort of neat tricks like that would be used. Often done as little demo programs that were very impressive. Before the internet it was hard to look up something like that and the latest and greatest tricks weren’t written in books yet. So often little code snippets and demo programs would be shared amongst programmers using the sneakernet, so we could all learn and get better.