Using contracts, random verification, and formal verification methods to ensure the integrity of software blocks, I believe. There's still dozens of us out there, heh.
Not just that, but there was a genuine effort to make programming more like connecting together components on a board.
How was that different than ideas found in object oriented programming?
There were folks that believe you could instantiate objects graphically, and just connect them together and wire them up. Take a look at Java Spring Beans, which let you describe object instances through XML that either defines an object instance or wires up other instances together.
I remind testing Java Studio as a student back in 1997, I guess that's Spring Beans spiritual ancestor.