My journey as a software developer began in the 80's at MIT by writing 3D graphics code on a Symbolics Lisp Machine. Some fond memories:
https://kaveh808.medium.com/late-night-lisp-machine-hacking-...
One big difference between then and now was that back then you wrote mainly from scratch and were in charge of most parts of your software, whereas today it is mainly about gluing various toolkits and frameworks together.