[eesmith]

For the people who found that interesting, yes, it was more interesting back then. Most projects were tight on memory, so those skills were needed, and easy to find comrades in the struggle.

However, people go into programming for many reasons. For those who were not interested in squeezing out every word, it was not interesting. Probably some people realized their tasks couldn't be done in the limited hardware of the time, so didn't even try until memory became significantly cheaper.

The past can seem like a golden era of mythic heroes.

Some from the generation you envy are themselves envious of the previous generation, where programmers were expected to write their own operating system - the vendor didn't provide one - and pull out a soldering iron and oscilloscope for debugging.

When many were writing yet another COBOL program for accounts processing.