There were compilers for the Univac which had 1000 words of main memory (which was mercury delay lines). There were two instructions per word. I do not know of any record of the organization of such compilers. There were few Univac applications that did not use magnetic tape as working storage. Most substantial application were likely to use tape sorts and merges for which there were good libraries. The 1401 Fortran did no tape sorts.

The art of organizing your algorithms around sequential memory access was already disappearing when I began to program in 1955. It had begun when data was in card decks.