Comment by fragmede

That's a really good question! The code to the old software, the first version of Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office, IdSoftware's Doom, are available on GitHub, and people have poured over them. Or more modernly, there's large open source projects out there currently. But most source isn't something anyone else would see outside of work because it's all proprietary software. Google's internal systems are a thing of beauty, but no one outside of Google can legally be shown them, so it goes unnoticed by the wider world. The closest thing we get to art appreciation thus is blogs like Raymond Chen's Old New Thing. He's a programmer with Microsoft that talks about what it was like to work on windows.