[CyberFonic]

In my experience, a decades ago, many sys admins never wrote programs, not even scripts to automate their work. This was more the case with IBM and similar mainframes and minis. In those environments the networking and various subsystems were complicated enough to require a team just to make sure things worked well. Many enterprise Windows deployments were also like that.

As programmers were increasingly required to administer the machines and networks they worked with, they also started automating their work a lot more than was possible with the rigid enterprise systems. Hence the emergence of the fusion of development and operations in certain cases. I think that the term "devops" can mean different things depending upon the technologies being used at a given site.