I'd go a bit further and say they usually accomplished the same thing with shoddier tools, but for a less spiky usage/volume pattern. And less reproducible, but

I'd go a bit further and say they usually accomplished the same thing with shoddier tools, but for a less spiky usage/volume pattern. And less reproducible, but even that only partially. The only real difference I see is that nowadays they're writing more "software" and less "scripts", fwiw. But the amount of pessimistic thinking about what will break next is the same :)