We've had RAD toolkits and other highly abstracted application toolkits geared towards ease of use for quite long now. HyperCard, PowerBuilder, Visual Basic... you could probably even throw in the Smalltalk environments in there to some extent.
The difference is that computer networking has become more seamless and ubiquitous, and so the process that you describe of hiring unskilled (by traditional measures) workers doing domain-specific programming work for low pay has become a more rational one to do, because of information accessibility.
The difference is that computer networking has become more seamless and ubiquitous, and so the process that you describe of hiring unskilled (by traditional measures) workers doing domain-specific programming work for low pay has become a more rational one to do, because of information accessibility.