Earlier times

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In earlier times like during the 50s and the 60s would we have been more employable?

I believe so. Work ethics were different, and people actually took pride in being employed at the same place for years, and hard, dedicated workers were valued. But other factors might have made things just as difficult, so I am not sure.

I've heard some say so, but ultimately it just depends on the Aspie. One of my biggest problems was always an inability to keep a consistent schedule and most bosses have a fit if you don't turn up at EXACTLY the same moment every single day. I never meant to be late, it was always as though the universe conspired to distract me and keep me a quarter hour behind schedule. Even getting up two hours early didn't help, I would still somehow, in spite of all my preparation, manage to fall behind and show up five to twenty minutes later than I was supposed to. Perhaps it was some sort of subconscious rebellion because my father was one of those people who have to be a half hour early for everything, but I think it was just some weird Aspie aversion to being told what to do. In any case, I don't think it would have gone over any better in 1958 than it ever did in 1998.

I think that we would have been more employable, back than.

How did things deteoriate and became like this? Where did things start going wrong?

I think it started going wrong in the 70's. There was a recession (I was a child) which meant that lots of people were laid off. When companies pulled themselves together, they found that it was far cheaper to move their factories to other countries and pay lower wages and have little to no government regulation rather than re-hire the people they had laid off.

That "pride in being employed at the same place for years and years" was destroyed overnight for thousands if not millions of workers as companies that consolidated or moved overseas in the 80's and 90's laid off mostly workers in late middle age to avoid paying them pensions. It's hard to be loyal when you just lost your job. Younger (and cheaper) workers saw what happened to their older co-workers and reasonably decided that loyalty to a company was a sucker's game. Their work ethic was eroded by the very visible evidence that if they gave it their all and worked as hard as they could, their reward could easily be a lay-off in their late 40's.

None of this has anything to do with Asperger's Syndrome, of course. But it could have some effect in that back in the 50's a worker with (obviously undiagnosed) Aspergers who found an employment niche could stay there until retirement pretty safely. These days and really since the 70's, no job is safe and people on the spectrum seem to fare best when things change least and would probably find it harder to bounce back after a middle age lay-off. That same worker in the 50's would have stayed employed through retirement.

Thank you for explaining that so clearly, Janissy! It makes perfect sense, too. In the late 90's, I was amazed at the changes wrought by managed care. Health care professionals working for large rehab companies, were laid off in droves. I was one of them. I had chosen a career in health care, because I believed that health care providers would always be able to find work. And yet, there were still lay-offs.

Yes.
Back then the wall street machine didn't run so fast,
If you worked in computers it was for places like IBM
and you made tons of money,
otherwise, you could work in a trade as a craftsman
or technician or factory and a man's job could afford
a house and family.
Other work such as steel and mining were more common.
Appliance repair was preferable to "throw away and get a new one".

You didn't need to know so many languages for people and
machines, and by languages for people, I mean nonverbal.
My father did not go to college and was able to find work
out of high school, buy a "sexy" car, soon become a technician
hundreds of miles from grandpa's house. I think he met my
mother on a field repair where she worked.

I often point out that school wasn't a fashion show back then
and that social skills (or manners) were commonly taught both
at home and school then, and with lots of family time and no
computers or video games and only 4 TV channels , there was
usually plenty of family time with at least one parent.

I am pondering a theory of exactly how AS became SUCH a disability,
that employment became a problem, but this part of it is implying
that WORK and BRAINS used to be worth more than SOCIALIZING on the job.
It is or should be common sense, but the wall street machine does
not do much except move money around at an ever increasing pace.
Someone I talked to works on machines that do nothing but find
a market "inefficiency" which lasts only a second until the machine
corrects it by buying anything in bulk at the lowest price and then selling
it at the highest possible price the moment the possibility of doing
so is automatically found by the machine. Or something like that.
This produces NOTHING but a quick buck, and perhaps fix prices to
what the market will bear... I don't know, that is definitely NOT my field of
expertise. But it certainly demonstrates that the whole point is to
accelerate and manipulate the flow of money itself without regard
for people, production, jobs, employment, goods, ... except how
less people can be paid less to do less (or more faster) to make more
money.

Things have CHANGED.
There is no longer the same relationship between money and business
and employers and employees and work and smarts and product and
service and production and "stuff".
Adapting to change will avoid suffering due to the irrelevance of the
former convolution of common sense into nonsense. If you are unemployed,
continue working and/or enjoy your vacation.

For all I know, the money policy and unemployment is engineered to cool off
the overclocked "machine", which has demanded too much power from the
economy and is experiencing a brownout. Corruption is another load. How
is it that cities that rose up in economic efficiency and surplus now cannot
maintain themselves, such that NYC is even "taxing" transportation to jobs?
Why is work wage taxed at all?

Zero-sum game? BUZZ! A good adaptation would be the win-win model.
The economic world could be like the
thermodynamic world, Liberated from the 2nd Law by The Sun.

The cost of Windows compared to Free Software is a consumption tax.
Maybe the wage tax is a slavery tax, and Freedom is the alternative.

It may have been (wasn't around at the time, so can't say for sure ).

I wonder if the fact that most women worked at home made a difference; after all, there would be less people vying for the same job.

Society also didn't place as much emphasis on good people skills in job descriptions, or at least, not as overtly.

I suffer that problem, no matter what I do I always turn up late. Not as late as you do, but I'm always somewhat late even though I wake up with enough time to get ready 20 times. Meanwhile, people who wake up ten minutes before they leave the house get there on time...