What strikes me is that back then we largely did the same things that we do now (run businesses, play games, manage personal data like calendars, notes, and con

What strikes me is that back then we largely did the same things that we do now (run businesses, play games, manage personal data like calendars, notes, and contacts) with a fraction of the capabilities that modern hardware and software provide. And it was much simpler and easier to get into. You could really only count on someone having an 80x25 text display (usually 16 color but might be monochrome), a keyboard for input, and a floppy drive for storage. Once you learned to do 4 simple things - position a cursor, print text, read keyboard input, and read and write to the drive, you could do almost anything that any professional software could do. There might be a parallel port with a printer or a serial port with a modem, so learning to read and write those ports gave you more options, but again that was simple. None of that required frameworks on top of libraries on top of dependency managers on top of package managers. You didn't need to memorize a 7000 class object inheritance hierarchy. Just a few simple statements and concepts that all easily fit in your brain at once with plenty of room left for working on the actual program. Of course, you couldn't watch streaming videos while chatting with people online in another window. We've added a lot of complexity for the sake of GUIs, multitasking, media, and networking, and in the process killed the ability to learn or do anything simply.