[Ma8ee]

Uh? Don’t talk about the pre- or early internet release process! Copy to floppy disks or burn CD, send by snail mail. For your little startup, hope you didnt miss any significant bugs before you payed for pressing 10 000 CDs at a quite significant cost. That was if you already had a customer. Get your software known? Well, I guess I’ll buy an ad in a relevant magazine.

[retsibsi]

But in many areas there was less competition by orders of magnitude, right?

[Ma8ee]

The whole market was much smaller. So maybe much less competition, but also much less market when only hobyists had computers at home and no one had smartphones.

The only "golden age" I can think of was the internet bubble when investors were crazy and threw money on anything that had anything to do with internet. Some kids made really good money "programming" HTML.

[retsibsi]

Fair points, thanks. (The question was only semi-rhetorical, as I'm only an observer rather than an insider, so I appreciate the genuine answer.)