Clearly due to hardware limitation of the time. A good programmer was able to code around those - or come up with a clever way to make it not as bad.
Fascinating that today you can have your own "private" instance of AI running at home, for about the same dollars as some people's stereo systems.
I imagine it learning about me, what I'm interested in, what I dislike, and forgetting over time information I'll never use is just around the corner. Yeah, I'm imagining it scouring the web overnight for stuff it thinks I'd find interesting from its experience in knowing me and presenting it in newspaper format, for a morning coffee read.