I was indeed around then. I built a fair few non trivial things on MSDOS and Windows with MASM 6, PDS7, VB3/4 and MSVC++. All offline. Mostly on airgapped networks. That and enbedded stuff with various tool chains.

We were definitely more productive. An order of magnitude more. As long as you picked appropriate tools. For example, I wrote a whole statistical analysis package in month (VB4). An ERP package in 6 months (access).

Code quality, which is difficult to objectively measure, was not really a problem.

Today I can barely even find a consistent UI toolkit which doesn’t fall to pieces, doesn’t require a server to run and doesn’t pull in 200 meg of untrusted JavaScript.

No more productive as in banging keys per second maybe.

But there's something valuable in figuring stuff out by yourself, I wouldn't trade that experience for anything.

You still have to figure out things for yourself today. Novel things instead of tedious things like "why doesn't this function work the way the docs say it should."

Again, anyone who was actually a programmer back then and is now today would never have nostalgia for those days. It was not better before.

Did I say better? I'm just saying it wasn't all bad.

Yeah, but figure what out? How to get wildly complicated thing A to talk to over-engineered piece of crap B, most likely.

For you maybe, otherwise a very broad sweeping statement.