[ElectricalUnion]

Programs were smaller with less expectations on them. Users were few and forcily clustered near the computer system. Attackers were limited and computer security was physical access control security.

Now, it is kinda expected that programs support "text" - non-lgc alphabets, context-sensitive collations, ligatures and cursive text, mixed bidirectional text, combining characters, input method support, locale-dependent string interpolation logic.

And one doen't simply handle all of that, not without bolting something else in your program that is probably larger that your program.

And that isn't even instants in time; those are much harder to handle correctly all the time.

[Ma8ee]

I’d say that we are programming on a higher level of abstraction today, so the programs do in some senses do more, but the size of the code we wrote then and now, and the complexities are of the same order of magnitude.