I am old enough to have started my career exactly in such an environment (COBOL in automotive industry). You are right, there was more discipline, and systems,

I am old enough to have started my career exactly in such an environment (COBOL in automotive industry). You are right, there was more discipline, and systems, no matter what size they were, were painstakingly described on paper first, then implemented (programmers had very little chance to come up with neat tricks), then tested. Infrastructure was very "primitive", but on the other hand you basically never had obscure bugs manifesting in your database, or your batch scheduler etc. On the other hand (I am talking of the late 80s) systems had already grown to a behemoth size, and unfortunately you could already find stuff that was messy and poorly documented. Take also in account that IT (at least in Europe) had a boom between 70s and 80s... but this also meant that lots of people started working in IT with almost no formal education and without any "craft experience": exactly the same mistakes and cul-de-sacs were independently made and discovered all over the place, and there was basically no way for developer X to know that someone else had already solved those, even if the other person was sitting across the street or two floors above.