It's easier in some ways but harder in a lot of others. For starters the definition of an "OS" has greatly expanded over time. In the CP/M and even DOS days i

It's easier in some ways but harder in a lot of others. For starters the definition of an "OS" has greatly expanded over time. In the CP/M and even DOS days it was a very primitive shell and some disk I/O routines. Secondly low level knowledge was a lot more common because you needed it to get anything done. You could do some interesting things in BASIC but "real" programs were written in assembly.