I was indeed around then. I built a fair few non trivial things on MSDOS and Windows with MASM 6, PDS7, VB3/4 and MSVC++. All offline. Mostly on airgapped networks. That and enbedded stuff with various tool chains.
We were definitely more productive. An order of magnitude more. As long as you picked appropriate tools. For example, I wrote a whole statistical analysis package in month (VB4). An ERP package in 6 months (access).
Code quality, which is difficult to objectively measure, was not really a problem.
Today I can barely even find a consistent UI toolkit which doesn’t fall to pieces, doesn’t require a server to run and doesn’t pull in 200 meg of untrusted JavaScript.
We were definitely more productive. An order of magnitude more. As long as you picked appropriate tools. For example, I wrote a whole statistical analysis package in month (VB4). An ERP package in 6 months (access).
Code quality, which is difficult to objectively measure, was not really a problem.
Today I can barely even find a consistent UI toolkit which doesn’t fall to pieces, doesn’t require a server to run and doesn’t pull in 200 meg of untrusted JavaScript.