I think much of that really depends on what kind of company/department you worked for, like I'd guess it does now. Apart from that, there were more constraints

I think much of that really depends on what kind of company/department you worked for, like I'd guess it does now. Apart from that, there were more constraints from limited hardware that forced you to get creative and come up with clever solutions for things that you can now afford to do in a more straightforward (or "naive") manner. It helped that you could (and usually did) pretty much understand most if not all of the libraries you were using. Chances are you had a hand in developing at least some of them in the first place. Fewer frameworks I'd say and fewer layers between your own code and the underlying hardware. Directly hacking the hardware even, like programming graphics card registers to use non-standard display modes. And I'd guess the chance that your colleagues were in it for the magic (i.e. being nerds with a genuine passion for the field) more than for the money were probably better than now, but I wouldn't want to guess by how much. Oh, and the whole books vs internet thing of course.