I keep meaning to answer this question but I keep getting distracted... :omg:

Yes, somebody changed the economics of programming (I've been programming for 42 years.) Allowing programmers to have fun has become too expensive because the 'market' has become sensitive only to the lowest price. We have only ourselves to blame for this because we all search for the lowest price on just about everything. This is why customer service had gone into the toilet and why being a programmer isn't much fun any more. Do what I did: retire and let them all go to H***! (except cave 76) The last bit is for the old-timers.

We used to call that 'push the blue button' and it was usually at the worst possible time. ("Take a stand-alone dump and IPL! I'll look at it in the morning.")

IBM was distributing PL/1 compilers and using PL/S to build their software (but refusing to release a compiler.)But most of our programming was Assembly Language. There was talk of a new operating system, MVS, where each user would have their own address space from zero to whatever. This way it would be impossible for one user to step on another's memory. Also PAGING would allow disk drives to create the illusion of more memory. "SLOW" does not even begin to describe what that was like. Nobody had more than 512K of memory though I eventually did see a huge cabinet roll in at Social Security with an entire ONE MEG of memory. (It was the latest in little magnetic core memory donuts.) Micro-computers did not exist but virtual machines were already very ordinary using IBM VM. IBM was well along with SMP and SMP/E which were remarkably good configuration management programs for the operating system. Microsoft has yet to come close to the solution IBM had over 40 years ago. Welcome to 1968, children.