And it had it's downside too. - Developing on DOS with non-networked machines. (OK,l one job was on a PDP-11/23) - Subversion (IIRC) for version control via floppy - barely manageable for a two person team. - No Internet. Want to research something? Buy a book. - Did we have free S/W? Not like today. Want to learn C/C++? Buy a compiler. I wanted to learn C++ and wound up buying OS/2 because it was bundled with IBM's C++ compiler. Cost a bit less than $300 at the time. The alternative was to spend over $500 for the C++ compiler that SCO sold for their UNIX variant. - Want to buy a computer? My first was $1300. That got me a Heathkit H-8 (8080 with 64 KB RAM) and an H19 (serial terminal that could do up to 19.2 Kbaud) and a floppy disk drive that could hold (IIRC) 92KB data. It was reduced/on sale and included a Fortran compiler and macro-assembler. Woo! The systems we produced were simpler, to be sure, but so were the tools. (Embedded systems here too.)