[mvindahl]

Did a my first paid software development pretty much exactly 30 years ago, specifically I was hired to port a word processor from the Amiga to the Commodore 64. So my experience is mostly related to the word of 8-bit home computers, already a dying world by then, and I wouldn't be able to tell how working in an office was like as a was still in school at the time and it was a side project.

The source code is here, by the way: https://github.com/mvindahl/interword-c64

Still, a few general observations about that particular corner and that particular time of software development:

- There were multiple successful 8-bit platforms, all of which were very different from each other. Different makes of CPU, different custom chips, different memory layout. You could be an expert in one and an absolute novice in others.

- The platforms were more constrained, by magnitudes. A very limited color palette, far fewer pixels, far less RAM, and far slower CPUs. For a semi-large project, it could even become a challenge to keep the source code in memory and still have room for the compiled machine code.

- On the upside, the platforms were also far more stable and predictable. A Commodore 64 that rolled out from the factory in 1982 would behave identically to one built five years later. Every C64 (at least on the same continent) would run code in exactly the same way.

One thing that followed from the scarcity and from the stability is there was an incentive to really get close to the metal, program in assembly language, and to get to know the quirks and tricks of the hardware. Fine tuning an tight loop of assembly code was a pleasure and one could not simply fall back on Moore's law.

It was a simpler world in the sense that you didn't have to check your code on a number of machines or your UI on a number of window sizes. If it worked on your machine, it could be assumed to work everywhere else.

Another thing that I remember is that there was more friction to obtaining information. The internet wasn't a thing yet but there were text files flowing around, copied from floppy to floppy, and you could order physical books from the library. But a lot of learning was just opening up other people's code in a mchine code monitor and trying to understand it.

Some of these things started to change with the Amiga platform, and once PCs took over it was another world, with a plethora of sound cards and graphics cards and different CPU speeds that people had to deal with.