You're right about all of that. :) I guess I assumed the context of the question was online services. People working on web sites, back in the 90s, often mess

You're right about all of that. :) I guess I assumed the context of the question was online services. People working on web sites, back in the 90s, often messed around right in production. But if I remember correctly, the mid nineties are when I started to hear about maintaining TWO environments and doing things in "test" first. Seemed really whiz bang at the time. What I'm mainly remembering, I suppose, was that any online service being down was just not a big deal, so it wasn't worth the extra infrastructure to avoid occasionally and temporarily breaking it. Nobody cared, at least not like they do now. And anyway, getting one copy working was hard enough!