Nope, that was added in Dwarf Fortress in 2008 (and it was a huge change at the time).

Sometimes I miss the predictable and ensured progression as you tunneled into the mountain and got farther from natural light.

Underground river -> Chasms -> Magma -> Bad Things(tm)

I almost prefer it, I think! It felt much more like a proper story game with a challenge rather than the modern result of "The Sims, but dwarves". A single Z-level may be too austere today, so perhaps a modern iteration could use the same layout but with three or four Z-levels. I wonder if there's a way to replicate that today with some map editing...

The real trouble I had with the old versions was the inability to build walls. As I recall, once you dug something out it was dug forever.

It used to be you could be almost completely safe if you just stayed in the upper z-levels and didn't dig too deep, but with the caverns update you now can find various types of fun imported directly to your back door.

Sometimes you have the fun, sometimes the fun has you.

When you generate your world you can change the amount of layers per layer zone.

I don't know the minimum off hand but it is probably around 6 normal stone or cave levels, minus the levels used for open sky space and magma sea which I don't know the minimum for. Trees are multilevel now and I don't know that they will grow on a single layer.