There were no 8085's or 8255's, yet my contemporaries and I learned to do our own work.

If you don't learn what's taught, regardless of whether or not it's current, those principles will be unavailable when it is necessary. Just because the features and functions are now internal to an 805x or whatever, rather than external to an 8085, they still must be understood.

I'd guess that the same folks who say, "gimme code" would still, in the same vein, say, "do my work and my thinking for me" if we were still working with 8085 and 8255.

RE