Good luck on getting fault codes on the earlier 700 series cars as they do not have the "blink box" under the hood and diagnosis on them is more of a trial and error thing and a matter of when the light came on.

The brake pedal should feel no different if the ABS light is on or off. The ABS system only functions when it is needed, i.e. panic stops etc, and the rest of the time it is passive and has no active part in normal braking sequences.

Depending upon when the ABS light comes on will dictate which area to look in. If you start the car and it never goes out then you have a hard fault in the system like a blown transient surge protector fuse or faulty control module. If you start the car and the light goes out and then comes right back on then you have to look for a hard wire fault like a broken wheel speed sensor harness or something. If your light goes out and then comes on above about 19mph then you need to look into dirty/faulty wheel speed sensors. The early cars did not have the capability to flash codes but they do have a series of tests and you need to know the sequence of the tests and what is being tested in each test to point you in the correct direction. Cleaning the front wheel sensors is your best bet. When they first came out with ABS we were running the diamond shaped Bosch sensors and never had a problem with them, the next year they went to a sandwich style of sensor made by VDO and they were pretty much garbage. If you have the sandwich style ones you may end up having to replace them, but regardless of their origin clean them up first and see what happens.

Mark