I think it is more distribution than development that is the big difference between now and pre-internet times as far as things that affect software quality go.
When I worked at places making software that would be sold to users on floppy or CD in stores like Best Buy and CompUSA back when very few of those users had internet connections these things were true:
1. If a user needed help beyond what was provided by the printed manual that came with the software and whatever help system we built into the software itself they would call our toll-free support number. The typical cost of such a support incident was more than our profit on selling the software to that user.
2. To distribute bug fixes to existing users we'd have to mail them floppies or CDs.
3. The only future revenue we would get from existing users would be from them buying more of our products.
These factors made management place a heavy emphasis on not shipping software until it was good enough that very few people would need support, that whatever bugs we missed were not severe enough or numerous enough that we'd have to ship updates, and that users would be happy enough with it that when they saw other products from us they'd want to buy them.
You released your product when it was done, and then you moved on to work on your next product.
When internet became the main means of both support and distribution much of that changed. Support became a lot cheaper for the developers for a couple reasons. First, users could turn to community forums that would often solve their problems without the company even getting involved. Second, if they did contact the company it would be via email or a web form rather than an expensive toll-free phone call.
Distributing updates to users became routine, and even automated. Accordingly the number and severity of bugs that can be in the first release has gotten higher. It just has to be good enough to not piss the user off too much before you can release an update.
The net (no put intended!) result is that nowadays people release at a stage when they have features and bug levels that in the floppy/CD retail days would have been considered beta or often even late alpha.
So it is not really that software sucks nowadays compared to back then. It is that back then users didn't even see the software until it was finished. Nowadays they get the software while it is still being actively developed.