I've always considered "real" programmers as meeting 2 criteria, 1) they look both ways before crossing a one way street, and 2) are able to complete their task within the limitations of the system they are using, as in well yes there are a lot of "old" systems out there, but that doesn't mean it can't be achieved.
Sometimes these limitations produce better systems if not with the ability to expand. I have an embedded systems background, and its amazing what one can do with a 2kb memory block, I always thought it was a luxury to have 8kb!. Even my field is changing now though, you can buy cheap microcontrollers/processors with Mega BYTES of memory and all sorts of data interfaces, and all it has brought are devices that try to do too much, and in an untidy way because of the additional resources people don't have to consider managing the resources, and get lazy.
I see way too many I.T projects (and even electrical/electronic products) now focusing on expansion or features rather than reliability, and they end up with 1001 features, with half of them buggy or non-functional rather than a 50 feature working in 99 years marvel.
Even though I am not that old myself I often get younger engineers having a joke at my expense because I chose to use a cheap and small device in something I am developing, but then they are the first to wonder why they fail to get the $$$ and don't get given the critical projects.
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