It's still magic though, isn't it? The hardware was slower and more limited, but at the same time the GPU wasn't event that much of a GPU by today's standards, for example. You had to do a lot of what modern GPUs do for you by yourself, on the CPU, sacrificing even more of what little performance it had.

A modern dev would wonder how on earth he's gonna get Node.js plus a thousand npm packages running on this so he can create a WebGL context to start making a game. ;)