I have a full set of Donald Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming" sitting on my shelf, unopened after two years. Maybe it is time to rifle through it and learn how to program like the pioneers did in the old days.
I suspect that programmers who have grown up in the era of the PC would be surprised at how much the vendors supplied. The IBM mainframes came with huge libraries of software and documentation. I remember being given a UNIX box for a project at the telco where I worked, and being a little surprised at how little was included compared to the IBM or DEC machines of the day.
There certainly were some good programmers around, but a lot of "development" consisted of taking a copy of some existing COBOL program and tweaking a few things to create a new report. Out of two or three years of working in COBOL, I don't think I ever wrote a program completely from scratch. As a creative outlet, it was much more interesting to work in C and try to figure out how the guys at Bell Labs were doing things. Those are the shoulders that many of us stand on today.