> However, presumably you wanted to test locally before deploying, so you needed a local install I wouldn't necessarily presume that. I mean I would want that

> However, presumably you wanted to test locally before deploying, so you needed a local install I wouldn't necessarily presume that. I mean I would want that now. But for my first forays into web development, I didn't have that. Precisely because it was hard to setup. I would just FTP stuff onto the "live" server (it wasn't exactly a critical site anyway, so if it broke for a while then that didn't matter so much). There were editors which could edit files directly on an FTP which made the dev workflow pretty seamless. Stuff like imagemagick could indeed be a pain. But you could at least get started without that. In general there were lots of problems, but the on-ramp to some dynamic behaviour was really minimal.