> Did you use SCM, automated testing and design patterns 20 years ago ? If yes do you think this was the norm in the industry ?
Design patterns are way older than 20 years... hell, the design pattern bible was published 22 years ago, which means design patterns were in wide circulation well before I could tie shoes. According to wikipedia CVS has been around for 26 years.
Even though I am ony 25 I can recognize that all the computing foundations is still the same. I work in a 80's style company deving embedded system and I constantly talk with the founders who used to program the first system we used to sell. They used to implement everything from scratch. Sharing code, open source stuffs and Internet are making our life easier. But at the end of the they the knowledge behind the libraries, frameworks used in the library is the same from the early times.
I picked up the CVS habit almost exactly 20 years ago (1996) from someone in the banking & finance industry -- hardly a bastion of radical adoption. By then, CVS was 10 years old. We used RCS extensively to manage config files.
To the earlier parent who mentioned process isolation: You're thinking too much about the consumer/desktop world. The entire enterprise world was used to it and demanded it, be it on (hey, humor here) SCO UNIX (yes, they really did make a useful product before they turned evil), SunOS, VAX/VMS, MVS, BSD UNIX, etc.
The desktop world was far behind the state of the art in commercial systems in those days. Even in the 80s, you were quite possibly running your enterprise with an Oracle database, on fully memory-protected hardware. Heck - you may have even been running some of your stuff in a VM on an IBM mainframe. We took some big jumps backwards in pursuit of making computers cost-effective enough for mass adoption, and it took a while before the consumer side of things jumped forward to become the same platforms used for enterprise use.
Design patterns are way older than 20 years... hell, the design pattern bible was published 22 years ago, which means design patterns were in wide circulation well before I could tie shoes. According to wikipedia CVS has been around for 26 years.