There was certainly some automation being done by the sysadmins I was familiar with (I did say "relatively little" in my original post, meaning compared to toda

There was certainly some automation being done by the sysadmins I was familiar with (I did say "relatively little" in my original post, meaning compared to today!) It was definitely more pets than cattle at the places I was familiar with. These were small-ish companies, and the business didn't care as long as the systems worked.