archive.org has a selection of Byte computer magazine issues from the 1980s. I don't think the design is particularly distinguished. It's functional and good enough, but it's not as polished as a generic Bootstrap site.
You have to remember that before the Mac arrived, if you wanted graphic design you had to pay someone. Or if you were ambitious, you'd maybe buy some stick-on letter decals and try to make them line up to make a headline or a logo. (It hardly ever looked good.)
Most people had no idea what fonts were, and if they were aware of graphic design at all it was because of vinyl album covers.
On computers, the previous generation of 8-bit micros couldn't handle fonts. So you had a choice between the system font, which usually looked ugly but might have some weird icons you could draw shapes with, and the kind of overwrought hand-drawn (pixeled?) lettering you'd find in many 8-bit games.
A lot of people underestimate how influential the Mac was. It turned graphic design into something everyone could work with - which is why you now have fast food joints with sandblasted Helvetica on their windows, and regular passing font fads, like Ray Larabie's Neuropol, which was everywhere ten years ago.
1990s/2000s web design was not a little crass, with Flash loading pages everywhere, lots of cyan and orange, fonts that said "Look at me! I'm a font!", and strange linear graphics with 45 degree kinks in them. Business sites were often messy and used a lot of Verdana and Tahoma - like Amazon's product pages, which haven't changed much in ten years.
The recent Bootstrap/etc fad has converged on a style that isn't distracting and works well when you want a clean but pleasing look. It's kind of homogenised, and not very creative, especially when it's paired with a hipster logo. But it does the job, and original creative graphic design is not easy.
Having lived through the 1990s and the early 2000s, I prefer the contemporary Bootstrap/Medium look by a long way.