[tacurran]

I think that today's developer tools, such as GitHub, represent the main difference to application developers. The secondary factor is ship cadence and deployment infrastructure. Lotus Symphony was one of my favourites at the time. It was so advanced with its own language "script" when it appeared. It supported add ins, an early predecessor to APIs, and had its own database. But dev tools such as Macro, Quick C, Quick Basic, MFC, Bench, NextStep, and Hypercard. There were many great Unix tools such as Emacs and RCS along with languages such as Smalltalk, LISP, Pascal, and C. And not to be forgotten Symbolics - the beginning of AI hardware. It was a great time to develop software. Anything was possible and everything seemed impossible. There was only some Internet (ARPANET) if you worked at the university like I did, or some advanced research lab, and to launch a product you went to trade shows and advertised in Dr Dobbs Journal. In the 80s we wrote wonderful software, and while as @rozzie says, most of it is gone forever, the innovations live on IMHO.