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Right. Something about hardware and OS staying stable long enough so that people could focus on creating new interesting software -- instead of just trying to keep up with ever changing APIs and constantly searching StackOverflow for ready made solutions.

Sometimes severe constraints drive the really beautiful solutions.

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Don't forget documentation. Sure, you couldn't look stuff up on StackOverflow, but there was actual, real, paper documentation you could read, and it was usually well-written and really useful. Try finding that these days, even in digital form. (Personally, I'll vote for the Qt documentation, but that's about all I've seen that's really that great.)

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