You could have a highly proscriptive spec, or almost none. It depended what kind of s/w shop you worked in.
I interviewed candidates for a sw position who fronted with serious lisp experience on live deployment: traffic lights control systems. (We wanted C. But it stuck in the mind)
Compile-Edit cycles could leave you time for lunch.
SCCS was still in use, RCS was just better.
You had to understand byte/short/word/longword behaviours in your compiler. Unsigned was tricky sometimes.
FP error was common. Not all the bugs were ironed out of libraries (NAG aside. They were really reductionist)
Use of global variables was not yet entirely anathema
The CPP could run out of #defines still.
Pdp11 were getting more uncommon but not dead. VAX were common. Sun's were 68000 mostly.
There was a gulf between IBM and their seven dwarves and everyone else. UNIX was not quite ubiquitous off campus but becoming so.
I interviewed candidates for a sw position who fronted with serious lisp experience on live deployment: traffic lights control systems. (We wanted C. But it stuck in the mind)
Compile-Edit cycles could leave you time for lunch.
SCCS was still in use, RCS was just better.
You had to understand byte/short/word/longword behaviours in your compiler. Unsigned was tricky sometimes.
FP error was common. Not all the bugs were ironed out of libraries (NAG aside. They were really reductionist)
Use of global variables was not yet entirely anathema
The CPP could run out of #defines still.
Pdp11 were getting more uncommon but not dead. VAX were common. Sun's were 68000 mostly.
There was a gulf between IBM and their seven dwarves and everyone else. UNIX was not quite ubiquitous off campus but becoming so.