I don't think the older generation of programmers were any better than the younger generation in terms of skill. I think they were, generally, more practical -- they don't generally engage in language wars or programming evangelism, but when they do, they speak directly from a massive body of experience that's hard to argue with.
I think that the problems that they spent most of their time on were generally simpler. The most challenging bit of magic I ever worked on a mainframe was convincing COBOL to do variable interpolation on what was essentially punchcard-data-on-disk. (COBOL has no string operators or variable types, for those that are unfamiliar.) That was challenging, but it was a tiny problem in terms of scope compared to, say, building a scalable web application with a database backend.
I've worked with and hung out with greybeards, and generally prefer their company to that of hyperactive younger programmers. (For one thing, they don't talk about programming much!) They built things the same way we do -- by thinking about it and then banging it out one line at a time. They just used different tools.
Documentation was better back when. That's one thing I really don't appreciate about the Google Era; now, if I need information on some function or language feature, I usually end up reading some incomplete community-submitted documentation and a stack of opinions from people who may or may not know what they're talking about. For anybody that got to use those lovely old massive 3-ring binders (they came in sets!) with professionally-written and compiled in-depth documentation covering every single aspect of whatever you were using, there's just no modern replacement.
Otherwise, I don't really think the field of computer programming has fundamentally changed in all these years. The people are about the same. (Greenblatt was a pretty annoying, hyperactive young programmer once.) Some things are different. Some things aren't.