[midoridensha]

>_You_ were the owner of every resource in the machine and it all danced to your tune. And, best of all, you could come to a complete understanding of how every part of those machines worked, in just a few weeks of practice. Who today knows the intricacies of their laptops to the same extent?

This is because you lived in the microcomputer world back then. Mainframe and minicomputer programmers lived in a very different world, and had many of the same problems: OS, permissions, concurrency, other users on the same machine, scalar vs vector processors, etc.