I come from that era too. The tools of the past still work blazingly fast on current PC. But look closely, a database such as postgresl is really light on reso

I come from that era too. The tools of the past still work blazingly fast on current PC. But look closely, a database such as postgresl is really light on resources and goes very fast for workloads of the 90's (or event SQLite). A C compiler with make goes fast too. Except your code now runs on a multiprocess operating system with tons of security, crash proof stuff (remember rebooting your PC because an off by one in your C code ?, remember fiddling with CONFIG.SYS to be able to use stuff about 640KB ?). A compressor is way faster than before. Stuff like Maxima are so much better now... The only thing that has inflated is UI. But as far as UI for coder are concerned, things are good today I think. I use emacs, it still rocks. I use IntelliJ and it's pretty fast + it has code refactoring, code navigation and other wonders. Sometimes I write Jupyter notebooks, have you ever saw that ? It's incredible how much powerful that is to explain ideas. Of course I could do it with pen and papers, but I have so much more comfort to do it now. So it's not that bleak :-) One more example, I write demos for Apple 2+ from time to time. And guess what : do I code them on the Apple 2 ? No way, 40x24 display ? floppy disks ? crashing computer ? No git ? No good text editor ? No browser ? Nope, I would never code on an Apple 2+ today. But coding on today's tool with Apple2 as a target, that's waaaaaay better than in the good old days !