I wrote my first code in BASIC on an HP3000 in 1975. There were a couple of CRTs in the computing room but they were hotly competed for by Star Trek players so

I wrote my first code in BASIC on an HP3000 in 1975. There were a couple of CRTs in the computing room but they were hotly competed for by Star Trek players so for the most part we worked on teletypes and stored our code on paper tape. When I started professionally 15 years later I worked at a desk in an office cubicle. I wore a shirt and tie and kept regular "office hours." Our team worked in C++ on Windows as part of a vanguard effort to adopt object-oriented techniques at the bank. The design processes and project management techniques however were still very waterfall. We had lots of meetings with stakeholders and project managers. We made and revised lots of estimates and the PM used lots of complicated charts and timelines to keep track of it all. The Internet and the web were still a couple of years off and all our work was "client/server" which mostly meant thick clients talking to SQL Server, manipulating the data and then writing it back. Feature requests, code and db schemas tended to balloon and estimates were never met unless they were for very small and discrete changes. I'm still working in the business today, though now I do cloud infrastructure and systems engineering and use linux. Obviously so much has changed that it's difficult to wrap it up narratively but if I had to pick one dramatic thing it would be access to information. It's hard for me to imagine myself back in those pre-web days even though I lived through them. I am fairly certain I could not do my job today without Google search and other online assets, and yet somehow we made do 30 years ago with actual printed manuals that you had to buy. I paid almost $150 for an IBM manual describing the VGA adapter port/IRQ mapping so I could write some mode X effects. :). I still have it somewhere down in the basement. When Microsoft first launched MSDN and made info available on CDs it was a revolution for me professionally. I suspect engineers who have grown up with all the technical info in the world at their fingertips would definitely feel like 1990 was the dark ages.