[gautamdivgi]

There wasn’t HN so no distraction to digress to every now and them.

I second this - systems were small and most people could wrap their brains around them. Constant pressure existed and there wasn’t “google” & “so” & other blogs to search for solutions. You had to discover by yourself. Language and API manuals weighed quite a bit. Just moving them around the office was somewhat decent exercise.

There wasn’t as much build vs buy discussion. If it was simple enough you just built it. I spent my days & evenings coding and my nights partying. WFH didn’t exist so, if you were on-call you were at work. When you were done you went home.

My experience from 25 years ago.

[convolvatron]

I actually used to do 'on call' by having a vt100 at the head of my bed and I would roll over every couple hours and check on things over a 9600 baud encrypted modem that cost several thousand dollars.

the only time I ever had to get up in the middle of the night and walk to the lab was the Morris worm. I remember being so grateful that someone brought me coffee at 7

[doug_durham]

I have one word for you "Usenet".

[gautamdivgi]

That was there. However, where I started 25 years back, they reserved Internet access for only privileged senior and staff engineers. I was a lowly code worm, No Internet, no usenet.