Anyone who has ever had to maintain old code will tell you that this more civilized age is right now and that the past was a dark and terrible time.

Seriously, there were no standards, there was barely any documentation even in large organizations and people did things all the time that would get you fired on the spot today. Sure, you had the occasional wunderkind performing amazing feats on hardware that had no business of running these things, but this was not the norm.