Ask HN: What was being a software developer like about 30 years ago?
It was great.  Full stop.<p>A sense of mastery and adventure permeated everything I did.  Over the decades those feelings slowly faded, never to be recaptured.  Now I understand nothing about anything. :-)<p>Starting in 1986 I worked on bespoke firmware (burned into EPROMs) that ran on bespoke embedded hardware.<p>Some systems were written entirely in assembly language (8085, 6805) and other systems were written mostly in C (68HC11, 68000).  Self taught and written entirely by one person (me).<p>In retrospect, perhaps the best part about it was that even the biggest systems were sufficiently unsophisticated that a single person could wrap their head around all of the hardware and all of the software.<p>Bugs in production were exceedingly rare.  The relative simplicity of the systems was a huge factor, to be sure, but knowing that a bug meant burning new EPROMs made you think twice or thrice before you declared something &quot;done&quot;.<p>Schedules were no less stringent than today; there was constant pressure to finish a product that would make or break the company&#x27;s revenue for the next quarter, or so the company president&#x2F;CEO repeatedly told me. :-)  Nonetheless, this dinosaur would gladly trade today&#x27;s &quot;modern&quot; development practices for those good ol&#x27; days(tm).