While today's code does a lot more, and has to deal with everything from internationalization to accessibility, I have to believe that we (I was around programming in those days!) were better at computer programming back when computers had memory measured in kilobytes than we are today.
I still take on jobs to do embedded programming in assembly language on PIC or similar processors and my clients are usually amazed at what can be done in tiny amounts of code.
I think part of the fun in the "old days" was that you could familiarize yourself with your tool chain in its entirety. I mean, I knew every command in Turbo Pascal, and virtually every feature of the "operating system" such as it was. Even finding out information about algorithms was hard before the Internet, so I had to wring my own.
The microprocessor wasn't radically different from the 4 bit computer that I built on breadboards for my college electronics class, and I could tell you pretty much all of the things it could do.
Then the only limitation was you and your own wits.
Today, not only is there a language to learn, but libraries, and a framework, and an architecture, and a "stack" and revision control system... you can't ever master the whole thing and it's changing faster than the baud rate of my eyeballs. It's still a boatload of fun, but a new kind of fun, and sometimes I like going back to the old kind.
My first "professional" language was ColdFusion. I literally took the manual that came with the install disks home and learned it all in about a week. (1999)
Severe limits/restrictions can influence some amazing solutions. To me, this separates the real programmers from the people that just get paid to bang out code. We went to the moon and back on this kind of severe limitations, yet today, we can't make a website without a library requiring 100s to 1000s of dependencies resulting in a total download larger than the amount of data required by the entire moon missions. That's just for one page of useless internet. I just shake my head at the silliness.
> We went to the moon and back on this kind of severe limitations
Adjusting for inflation, NASA spent $283 billion going to the moon[0]. I can't be bothered to find a breakdown of how much of that budget could be directly tied to writing code, but I suspect that the investment was a wee bit higher than a rando frontend dev slapping together some libraries in 2020.
Not that I disagree with your point, but the computers used for the Apollo program needed a healthy amount of printed manuals and ground-based support to be functional. They were only a part of the computational stack required for Apollo.
I still take on jobs to do embedded programming in assembly language on PIC or similar processors and my clients are usually amazed at what can be done in tiny amounts of code.