Comment by Sophistifunk

Back then the whole system was designed to do stuff for us. Now, so much of it is designed to work against us. Monstrous towers of complexity for the sole purpose of stopping you getting a high definition output without copy protection, or download a permanent copy of a video you are watching, or learning how your video card works without a million dollars and an NDA. And there was so much less of it. There's huge swathes of unexecuted code just for rendering text backwards in case I wake up Arabic tomorrow, etc.