Look at some of the cloud offerings and thing about how long it would take to implement those things from scratch with things available in 1990. Stuff like NLP or Maps.
Back then if you wanted to put a map on your website is was probably impossible. Now it's a widget a 12 year old can put on their website.
Well, he said 1990... there were no websites in 1990. I definitely agree with OP that the stuff that we do on the web today would have been impossible even in 1995 when the web was at least available, but that's because browsers were limited, not because programming was limited. In terms of programming, nearly everything that is done today could be programmed back then using the tools available, we're just dealing with larger volumes and higher latencies today.
Back then if you wanted to put a map on your website is was probably impossible. Now it's a widget a 12 year old can put on their website.