An Apple II in 1982 has 256 Kb of RAM. My first computer, an Acorn Atom, had 12Kb of RAM with the expansion pack, and packed two programming languages into 1Kb of RAM. I used to write Assembler on it, and there were 3 registers and no paging at all.

I wrote an timesheet tracking system for my A-level in 1986 on my BBC micro (the Atom's big brother). It took me more than half an hour, but it worked and did useful things. I'm sure it had bugs in it.

So I remember this period you're describing. Your software chief was a dick, though turning up 30 mins late on your first day would be a firing offence in any job back then.

We learned how to code when coding was very simple. There were no GUIs, no mice, all professional software was menu-driven. Screens had one resolution. None of these systems were networked, you only ever had to deal with one user. Security was never an issue, there was no external interface at all. Performance was usually not an issue, because everything was so simple. The OS was tiny and did almost nothing [0]. You could write software quickly because everything was much, much, simpler back then.

I'm seeing people who have never coded before write useful apps in 2026, against our modern massively more complex and intricate tech stack, using LLMs. No it's not perfect, but it's improving. There is absolutely zero chance that they could write an app themselves, or learn how to do that in less than a year, like we did back in 80's, because everything is so much more complex now.

[0] yes there were systems that did do all these things, but they weren't on the machines we're talking about here.