It was not better. Power supplies in the 80s were not very high efficiency. They did not have much in the way of low dropout regulators meaning the boards blew waste heat constantly with few sleep modes invented yet. It wasn't even cpu cycles generating that heat, just resistive waste. All of the peripherals like disks and of course the CRT had quiescent draw as well.
So the 80s were not good. The 60s and 70s -- even worse. Gas had lead. And it spewed everywhere and we'll never get it out.
But computers use a lot more power nowadays. The early home computers were all passively cooled. My Atari ST power supply actually broke down on me so I had to buy a new one from Great Britain. It's a quite small affair with quite minimal venting through the grills at the top of the chassis.
More passive cooling nowadays would be great, I am totally with you there. But the 80s were awful. I drank water from lead pipes. The fuel economy was atrocious. Murder rates through the roof. They didn't have statins so my dad's friends had heart attacks in their 40s, despite not smoking or anything. Colonoscopy? What's that? Everything is truly better. Sadly, democracy is not advancing as fast as technology though. I would say the 80s had some fun tunes and cute artistic tastes that I still enjoy. Hope not to forget those.
One of my dream projects is a graphical, single-user operating system for, say, small ARM microcontrollers. You can easily get 10x the computing power of an Atari that runs in tens of milliamps.
I remember reading that the Apple 2e was the first device with a switching power supply and the power supply design revolutionized power supply design for years to come. Is that true?
In the book "I, Woz", Steve Wozniak explains that Jobs hired a random hacker Rod Holt to design switching mode power supply unit for their Apple II computer. Jobs paid him $200 a day which was a lot of money by that time. Rod did the best work he could.
So the 80s were not good. The 60s and 70s -- even worse. Gas had lead. And it spewed everywhere and we'll never get it out.