That's not really true, beware not to fall into a "Golden Age Fallacy".
I am sure many of us will be able to debug stuff even more crazy than that. Just look at all those hardware startups popping up lately. Let's check back in 20 years.
I agree that there are some very interesting hardware startups and that we will read some great stories in 20 years, but I disagree that the most of us will have a chance to work on them. I'm under the impression that the average HNer is working on some location aware social networking mobile thingy.
This is not a "in the days of old, when men were men and women were men, too" kind of thing. Most of us will, probably, spend the next 20 years doing the web/mobile stuff.