I actually have the opposite reaction. Maybe because I've worked a bit with embedded computing, and been doing productive work on a computer since 1985; I'm not so misled and enthralled by fancy graphics, for instance.

In any case, even though I know something of the history of computing, every time I read more about, say, the AGC I am impressed anew by just how capable that little machine was and what it could do. And by how nicely designed it was.

I don't know how someone could look at the 70's and think that was so quaintly old-fashioned space flight was beyond them. This was the time of the 747, Concorde, Trieste, ICBMs and nuclear submarines, the beginnings of the digital age and the Internet Age. Composite materials, hybrid engines, biotechnology, SEM, micro-fabrication. All of that was already here.

And of course there's the other part of the argument. Yes, the digital revolution arrived. Computers are more compact and more capable, and digital allows more capable sensors and more robust data transmission...and of course there are advances in cybernetics and control loops and telerobotics and machine intelligence.

And all of that DOES make spaceflight "easier." It just doesn't do it in quite the way the callow thinkers imagine. Technological change is not straight-line extrapolation. A modern automobile is not a 1970's muscle car with even more compression and and even louder engine.

We didn't gain the ability to throw two-hundred pound fragile meat bags into orbit cheaper. We gained the ability to do more with smaller, lighter, and cheaper electronics packages. Space flight is more advanced, yes. And that's why it is mostly robotic now.