Can't say for 30 years ago but 22 years ago it sucked.
- There were no containers/Docker yet so everything had to be installed on server every time manually or by a hand-hacked script and not always easy to repeat on the next server. Produced mystical bugs. Glad we have Docker today.
- Source code control system of the era sucked vs git. Back in the day it was CVS and VSS, then everyone got hooked on SVN about 20 years ago, then there was a duopoly of Mercurial and Git, and finally, Git won about 10 years ago. Life got a lot better once we got Git.
- There was no virtualisation yet. VMWare just appeared around the time, being a very slow software emulator, barely usable. So you needed to have several physical computers to test things on, necessitating an office for at least management and testers, others could work remotely.
- Internet sucked, was good only to send mail and commits, and some task tracking systems. Voice communication relied on phone calls before Skype, video communication was impossible, so physical meetings were necessary for remote and partially remote teams.
- Worst of all, there were no package managers yet so building something from source required an awful lot of work. This is why Perl was so popular in the day even being so terribly cryptic - it had a package manager and a big library of packages in it, the CPAN. It was almost as good as npm today and used same way, and now this is expected from any language or platform, but back in the day, was unique.
(and yes, at least Linux was already a thing. i can only imagine how bad it was for those who worked just 5 years before when they had to rely on commercial server OSes)
- There were no containers/Docker yet so everything had to be installed on server every time manually or by a hand-hacked script and not always easy to repeat on the next server. Produced mystical bugs. Glad we have Docker today.
- Source code control system of the era sucked vs git. Back in the day it was CVS and VSS, then everyone got hooked on SVN about 20 years ago, then there was a duopoly of Mercurial and Git, and finally, Git won about 10 years ago. Life got a lot better once we got Git.
- There was no virtualisation yet. VMWare just appeared around the time, being a very slow software emulator, barely usable. So you needed to have several physical computers to test things on, necessitating an office for at least management and testers, others could work remotely.
- Internet sucked, was good only to send mail and commits, and some task tracking systems. Voice communication relied on phone calls before Skype, video communication was impossible, so physical meetings were necessary for remote and partially remote teams.
- Worst of all, there were no package managers yet so building something from source required an awful lot of work. This is why Perl was so popular in the day even being so terribly cryptic - it had a package manager and a big library of packages in it, the CPAN. It was almost as good as npm today and used same way, and now this is expected from any language or platform, but back in the day, was unique.
(and yes, at least Linux was already a thing. i can only imagine how bad it was for those who worked just 5 years before when they had to rely on commercial server OSes)