It was very process heavy in my experience. Because of the available technology development was slow and costly, so the thought was to put a lot of process around development to minimize the chances of projects going off the rails.
We were also in the "object nirvana" phase. Objects were going to solve all problems and lead us to a world of seamless reusable software. Reusability was a big thing because of the cost. Short answer: they didn't.
Finally I am astonished that I'm routinely using the same tools I was using 30 years ago, Vim and the Unix terminal. Not because I'm stuck in my ways, it because it is still state of the art. Go figure.
I'd never go back. The 90's kind of sucked for software. Agile, Git, Open source, and fast cheap computers have turned things around. We can spend more time writing code and less time writing process documents. Writing software has always been fun for me.
What's amazing about the major improvements you list there (besides the cheap computers) is that many of them could easily have been done on 80s/90s equipment. We had rcs and cvs but most people just had a batch file that made a copy of the working directory, if anything.
But then a lot of software was relatively "simple" back then, in terms of total lines of code; most everything today is a massive project involving many developers and much more code. Necessity brought around things like git.
I missed a big change in my list which is the Internet. We were using the internet in 1992. I remember FTP'ing source code from machines in Finland from here in Silicon Valley. I knew it was going to change the world.
Ubiquitous networking means that new developments are now instantly available instead of having to wait for the publishing cycle. People can share instantly.
Open source changed everything. In 1992 you'd need to get your accounting dept to cut a PO and then talk to a sales person to get new software. Most software being freely available today has been like rocket fuel for the industry. If you'd told me in 1992 that in 30 years most software would be distributed open source, and that the industry as a whole is making much more money, I'd have said you were crazy.
That all said, this particular conversation would have been occurring over Usenet in 1992 using almost exactly the same format.
Yeah it's absolutely amazing to think of the huge, HUGE names in the computer world from the 90s whose only product was something that is now entirely open source and given away for free.
I'm talking not only things like Netscape Navigator but all the server software vendors, etc. And even where things still exist (the only real OS manufacturer anymore is Microsoft and Apple, everything else is a Linux) they've been driven free or nearly so. Windows 95 was $209.95 on launch ($408.89 in today's dollars) but a boxed copy of Windows 11 is $120 - and MacOS is now "free".
To be fair RCS and CVS sucked. I remember trying to use CVS in the early 2000s when SVN wasn't even out yet, and if I remember the experience correctly, even today I might be tempted to just write a batch file to take snapshots...
We were also in the "object nirvana" phase. Objects were going to solve all problems and lead us to a world of seamless reusable software. Reusability was a big thing because of the cost. Short answer: they didn't.
Finally I am astonished that I'm routinely using the same tools I was using 30 years ago, Vim and the Unix terminal. Not because I'm stuck in my ways, it because it is still state of the art. Go figure.
I'd never go back. The 90's kind of sucked for software. Agile, Git, Open source, and fast cheap computers have turned things around. We can spend more time writing code and less time writing process documents. Writing software has always been fun for me.