A few things off the top of my head, as a programmer in 1980: - Quite possibly you still used punch cards to enter your programs. - Probably you had a degree

A few things off the top of my head, as a programmer in 1980: - Quite possibly you still used punch cards to enter your programs. - Probably you had a degree in something other than computer science. Math, physics, electrical engineering, something like that. - Probably you were the only one working on whatever application or system you worked on. - Probably you didn't have any kind of internet or email access. If you needed help figuring out a problem, you went to books. - Very likely you didn't have any kind of proper source control, automated testing, or bug tracking. - Most likely you didn't have any software libraries to work with other than whatever came in your language core library. (I learned to program in 1981, but I was only 9 years old at the time, so some of this is secondhand.)