Everyone should expect to change careers a few times in their life. Forty years ...

svachalek · on Oct 19, 2021

A few things off the top of my head, as a programmer in 1980:

- Quite possibly you still used punch cards to enter your programs.

- Probably you had a degree in something other than computer science. Math, physics, electrical engineering, something like that.

- Probably you were the only one working on whatever application or system you worked on.

- Probably you didn't have any kind of internet or email access. If you needed help figuring out a problem, you went to books.

- Very likely you didn't have any kind of proper source control, automated testing, or bug tracking.

- Most likely you didn't have any software libraries to work with other than whatever came in your language core library.

(I learned to program in 1981, but I was only 9 years old at the time, so some of this is secondhand.)