heh. Don't even get me started on how the 90's had the best programmers (to a degree!).
I feel like having restrictions on sizes and such forced people to be better and get better and do more with less. Once CD-ROMs came around things got worse and developers got lazier and worse at being creative and optimizing.
The down side of that though was hilarious 20 disk installs of things like Windows, and disk trays and cases that took up a lot of space. And they got damaged easily or corrupted.
It was the EMM386 of times, it was the "modify your config.sys, autoexec.bat, and tinker with IRQ settings"'s of times.