This will make you feel better if not for just a little while.
 
http://www.infoworld.com/...amming-graybeards.html

Heh Heh

I'm not bearded or beaded though.
 

You used to be able to make popcorn from the heat of a disk pack (and a good programmer could tell what program was compiling by the acceleration of the popping!). 

You said disk pack.
 
I like that.

Yep.  That's what they were.  And HOT mo-fo's they were too!

I used to be able to tell if a program was running correctly by the pattern of lights (neon push-indicators) flickering.  Of course these were highly repetitive routines (continuous gravity vector calcs), not like somebody listening to mp3s or running a word processing application.
 

 
 

I remember seeing a guy on TV years ago who could, with ear plugs in, tell what Beatles track was playing by the motion of a candle flame in front of the speakers. Same sort of thing. 

Remember the 1999 joke going around about the impending Y2K "crisis"?
 
A programmer was so fed up with the mess that he had himself cryogenically frozen so he could sleep through the whole Y2K thing. Like Philip J. Fry, he wakes up a thousand years later. "Welcome to the 31st century", he hears. "As you know, the year 3000 is coming up and we understand you have some COBOL experience..."

I cut my teeth on BASIC and COBOL. A HUGE factor in coding back then was how much resource a program took. Anyone could write code...but if you didn't want to wait a half hour or more for it to complete, or even bring down the system, you had to code smart. I remember a complex business program I wrote that even using every trick I knew, I didn't dare run on a full set of data for about 4 or 5 years....The system had to catch up with me.
 
And "Yes": My beard is gray when I let it grow out.