My experience starting fresh out of college in early '94 was pretty similar to what others here are saying. Parts of it were great - work life balance was defin

My experience starting fresh out of college in early '94 was pretty similar to what others here are saying. Parts of it were great - work life balance was definitely better. Systems were simpler and easier to understand. Parts of it were terrible - no static analysis or memory analysis tools, no unit or integration tests. (Well, we had integration tests that were humans running the final product to see if it all integrated together well enough!) Businesses were still very old-school. There were dress codes (though thankfully I didn't have to wear a tie). What's interesting is that there were still fads of the week. The main product I worked on (a cash register system) had originally been generated by a code generation tool that someone had sold the company as a way to reduce their programming costs. Its main event loop was something like 50 screens long (though in their defense, screen were only about 800x600 pixels then). We had internet, but it was different than today. Instead of HackerNews, we had Usenet News. It was a pretty good system for what it was. I had a specialized reader just for Usenet. There was IRC and AOL for chat. There was no music or video, though. Images just barely worked. Because I worked for a large company, we had source control, but it was something written in-house and was pretty bad. (But better than nothing.) We wrote in Visual C++, which was not visual at all in the way that Visual Basic was. In terms of simpler systems, one thing I just remembered was that because I worked for a large corporation, we had a hardware analyzer that we could use to see the exact instructions the CPU was running in order to debug really hard problems. I only used it once or twice, but it worked really well. (I mean the UI was terrible, but you could get some great info out of it.) I think someone said the device cost like $50,000.