Working in the software industry, circa 1989
1995 India - Had a paid internship (Rs 2500 per month or ~ USD 80 back then) with a small software company that worked on FoxPro + dBase. A very diverse team (gender ratio), the highly enthusiastic bunch created software for non-banking financial companies. 
A thick documentation book occupied most of the space in the large, laminated box that such development software came in. Along with half a dozen floppy disks where we hoped that no disk would have a bad sector. 
Requirements were constantly over the phone from clients and shipping software meant taking two sets of floppy disks of different brands (backup!), in-person, to the city where the client was. 
CRTs needed a warm-up time and we had a small diesel generator (hand cranked) to power up the x86 computers once the main power line crashed (which was frequent). 
No internet searches, no help other than that thick paper manual or waiting around for hours for a senior engineer to get free to help you out. 
College taught us C and Pascal on Unix. 
That seems so far away from the world of microservices and SPAs.
