I was thinking about that recently. Maybe decades from now people will look at things like the Linux kernel or Doom and be shocked that mere humans were able to program large codebases by hand.
I was being a little facetious, but there are things that most people would find tedious today that we would put up with in the past. Writing anything long by hand (letters, essays), doing accounting without a spreadsheet, writing a game in only assembly language, using punch cards, typesetting newspapers and books manually...
