I remember some software that made inefficient use of the display, but the best programs were carefully designed to show as much of the user’s work as possible, on screens with far fewer pixels or character cells than those of today.
For example, the WriteNow word processor for Macintosh computers was successful, in part, because of its user interface design, which put the horizontal ruler in a separate, undecorated window, with the controls for paragraph alignment, tab stops, and line spacing kept hidden until needed, but still discoverable. This worked well, especially on nine-inch desktop (512×342) or first-generation PowerBook (640×400) displays.
