[stergios]

I worked on a very capable unix based CASE system for Athena Systems in 88 & 89. There's still some articles about it online like here https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electronics/80s/88... (complete with screen shots) on page 37. What I recall being the uphill battle was fighting the peace dividend granted by the cold war ending. Defense contractors, our primary market, we’re in cost cutting mode for a decade.

[OhMeadhbh]

The 80s were a magical time. We still believed tools could help us make better systems. Then in the 90s everyone decided they were hardcore coders who didn't need crutches. And then ESR insisted that a bazillion people glancing at a couple of lines of code at a time would fix any bug. And in the 2000s someone seriously misunderstood XP and said that "Agile" meant you didn't need to have a spec or a design because you were writing code that was easy to change and when you figured out what you were trying to do you just refactored your code and viola! the MVP emerged fully formed out of the forehead of Zeus! In the 2010s we stopped doing unit tests because no one read Kent Beck's book and complained that they didn't know what a unit test was and it seems like a bad idea to write tests for code that hasn't been written (and they were probably right because by this time no one knew what the product was supposed to do and we're just going to open source it so our community will fill in the functional bits that we didn't have the time to get around to.) And by now there's a single function call in Python 3.12 that does exactly what you want to do so our entire startup is just an API wrapper around python.

People wonder why I still have a VAX and a PERQ and a TI Explorer at home that I program for fun.

Which is my way of saying... hmm... the link above didn't include a reference to which page to look at but searching for "Athena" led me to page 37 and yes, that does look very nice.

[pjmlp]

Back when we wouldn't mind rewriting stuff in Assembly across machines, to make an application "portable" instead of shipping a Web browser with the application.