Check out 1986. From a drivers championship perspective it was very exciting, with 4 drivers in the hunt right up to the end, with an edge-of-the-seat, sparky finish. Senna was already establishing himself as the qualifying master.
The cars were more fragile then than they are now, the engineering was very ragged-edge, looking for speed at the expense of almost everything else. Remember, at that time they didn't have the budgets they have now and a lot of their R&D was done on race weekends. If it worked you placed well, if it didn't then you were left at the side of the track or a lap or two down. Wind tunnels and test days were rare. A driver had to have a lot of "mechnical sympathy" if he wanted to finish consistently. The disapointment in Schumacher's DNF on the weekend underlined the difference between the modern era and years past: that sort of thing used to happen very frequently.