In my experience, Germany is the most common exception to the "programming is done in English" rule.
In general, these things happen, and are not restricted to pre-Internet times - in fact, I most often see it in random webshit SaaS developed in Europe - things like, say, food delivery - Pyszne.pl and pizzaportal.pl (defunct) come to my mind. Those sites tend to be well-localized, so they seem like local businesses targeting the national market. But then you accidentally look at an URL deep in ordering form, or the ordering form breaks and you pull up dev tools to fix it, and suddenly you realize the SaaS operator is actually German or Swedish or Dutch, and they're just deploying the same platform across the EU, with a really good localization polish.
In general, these things happen, and are not restricted to pre-Internet times - in fact, I most often see it in random webshit SaaS developed in Europe - things like, say, food delivery - Pyszne.pl and pizzaportal.pl (defunct) come to my mind. Those sites tend to be well-localized, so they seem like local businesses targeting the national market. But then you accidentally look at an URL deep in ordering form, or the ordering form breaks and you pull up dev tools to fix it, and suddenly you realize the SaaS operator is actually German or Swedish or Dutch, and they're just deploying the same platform across the EU, with a really good localization polish.