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Clear requirements and a singluar task, doesn't sound like he also had to balance a load of other projects, meetings, rituals, etc. He was able to do deep work as the hype books call it.

I'm probably romanticising it, but it was a time where software engineers and their skills, time and attention span were still respected.

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We learned to code this way in school, exams gave us a printed copy of the API docs and as much paper as we wanted. Any compiler errors or warnings were point deductions, so people eventually got good at writing code that compiled on the first try.

But in actual professional coding practice over 10+ years, I can count on one hand the occasions where I had clean enough reqs and enough uninterrupted time to design software like that, and still have enough fingers left over to hold a pencil.

Note that Multics had a particularly good work environment: https://multicians.org/devproc.html

In particular, management was tech-savvy and everyone liked and respected each other. Most were also talented.

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