This sounds like a falsehood, brought about by the belief that the past was somehow simpler, because the relics from the past that survive into the modern day a

This sounds like a falsehood, brought about by the belief that the past was somehow simpler, because the relics from the past that survive into the modern day are few in number. I doubt that everyone knew C. Lots of big firms extensively used COBOL. Fortran was important in science/numerical computing. Pascal was popular. The list goes on. Need I mention that for decades, there were lots of competing assembly languages, and that only in recent years we've converged on three? That Harvard Architecture and Von Neumann Architecture competed into the late 70s? That compiling a program on a machine with particular hardware could be seriously difficult? The conflict between big-endian and little-endian systems? Computing has always been full of heterogenous, competing technology stacks, frameworks, methodologies, etc. Why? https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ And in the 90s in particular: do you really think that designing software for this so-called "internet" and newfangled HTML and JavaScript was free of trendy keywords?