Despite this being an obvious honeypot to out the old people on HN, I'll bite. There's not much to miss about development practices of yore, except for the way better emphasis on documentation. I find most software developers today can't write worth a damn in their development practice. Requirements, specs, code comments, end user documentation, you name it. Really terrible bar. Perversely enough though, software developers today who blog can write amazing documentation on how to code. Go figure. OTOH, to view development in the 70's to the 00's from an emotional lens, what I miss the most was really living through the hockey stick of Moore's law. Everything was new and exciting until it got replaced 18 months later with a newer and more exciting thing. And back then, you were a sucker to bet against Moore's law. All it took to get a front row seat to this action was to code.