Well I have seen a lot of less than mediocre code from the last century. This code I have seen was from huge successful companies and many of us used such products or depended on them. I think in no way the old school programmers where more capable as any passionate programmer is today. If anything they had the opportunity to concentrate on less complex systems (multithreading?) and less, less complex technologies. Maintainability was not yet invented back then also. I must admit on the other hand today there are some mediocre programmers around that you might not want in your company, because of the sheer demand.