what kills my productivity is when it takes more than 5secs to compile/load/whatever.
Of course, at that time, few companies were connected 24x7. My employer, for example, dialed in for mail and Usenet traffic exchanges a handful of times a day.
The debates over the first ANSI C spec in comp.lang.c were most entertaining.
I remember the joy when we got Cadence BuildGates to start running parallel synthesis and optimization runs. This allowed us to go from one build per week to two. If we were lucky!