[kosak2000]

I don't have any experience starting a company so I can't say. I will say that computers (and therefore expectations) were vastly simpler back then. You could reasonably believe you understood exactly what was happening in every piece of your Apple ][, and that allowed you to sometimes do some clever/tricky stuff with it.

My point is that this scale meant that one person could write a program of publishable quality all by themselves. This would be borderline impossible today. I'm thinking of AAA video games and their enormous development costs. It's still possible to do some quirky or cult products (like agar.io or homestuck or whatever) that could be the work of one person.