I thought about the early days too - far less planning involved, smaller conductors, less weird stuff. When the house I live in was built in 1913-14 every room had one single pole switch and ceiling light as well as probably one receptacle. The whole house (8 apartments) was fed with 220/440V Edison DC, both legs fused @25A!
Nothing like door control, smoke detector, forced smoke extraction and whatever else systems I have to struggle with on a daily basis as a planning engineer today.
On the other hand... being a site electrician back then in Europe had one SERIOUS disadvantage - the rotary drill hammer hadn't been invented yet! Every single piece of conduit had to hacked into the wall using a sledge hammer and cold chisel!
All wires had the same color... had to ring out where each wire went before connecting.
Main cables were nice too... bare conductors embedded in black tar, then wrapped in strands of string. The whole cable was an inch in diameter for just something like 12-3. Terminations were made by removing the tar, pulling the wires through some kind of gland, sleeving the exposed conductors and then filling the gland with tar.
