The big thing for me was address space size and computer sophistication. DOS was still popular because it was so much cheaper than a workstation. Single-taskin

The big thing for me was address space size and computer sophistication. DOS was still popular because it was so much cheaper than a workstation. Single-tasking means exiting your editor to do code check-ins and having to reload your context a lot. Networking was definitely an after-thought that many didn't have access to. The bigger issue was the device you were programming. Small memory. Pointer sizes that might not be what you expect. Integers that overflow if you fail to think about their sizes. Pointers that cannot reliably be compared without normalizing them first. No threads. An operating system that does nothing other than provide access to files. I've used C++ for my entire career. CFront 1.2 was a very different language than modern C++. Sometimes people wonder why I use stdio.h instead of iostreams: it's because stdio.h is basically unchanged since cfront and that code still works while and iostreams have changed significantly multiple times requiring re-writes. One thing I miss is some of the color schemes in the Turbo Pascal/C IDEs. Yellow on Magenta and Yellow on Cyan were fantastic. I'm not sure why those color schemes don't work in GUIs -- I suspect it's because the geometry of fonts is so much different than text-mode graphics. Text mode had super thicc and clear fonts made out of so very few pixels.