The author’s point about so much not being necessary today, while simultaneously having more drudge work is interesting. I’ve often thought the former, but hadn’t connected it to the latter. For example, I commandeered my family’s two PCs (a Celeron 333 MHz and a Pentium III 550 MHz – what a screamer!) at night to run distcc on, so that Gentoo builds would finish in a somewhat reasonable amount of time. This is simply not necessary anymore. Firefox, which used to be an overnight job, now compiles in 10-20 minutes for most modern CPUs.
On the one hand, this is wonderful – faster feedback loops, more time to tinker. On the other hand, getting distcc set up back then was a fairly large undertaking for a kid, and taught you a good deal about a wide range of topics. Also, since the pain level of failure was so high, you were more careful to get it right the first time, lest you awaken to disappointment.