In the late 90s, I used to collaborate with about 10 people, all in the same office on the same LAN, for production of a magazine that sold IT stuff. We used t

In the late 90s, I used to collaborate with about 10 people, all in the same office on the same LAN, for production of a magazine that sold IT stuff. We used the "Excel Shared Spreadsheet" functionality. The file was hosted on a network drive. It corrupted or crashed so frequently - even when only one person had it open - that we took to copying it to your local machine, making the network copy read-only, editing the local copy, then copying back onto the network drive. Even this was buggy, so possession of a stuffed octopus represented a lock on the file. Microsoft themselves got involved at one point, as we were a reseller for their products. Their solution was no better. So if there was a halcyon period for collaboration at some point in the past, I'd like to know when it was. When I see 100 people live editing the same Google Sheet, I think perhaps we are in the golden age.