I started my career 30 years ago at Apple. There was no internet, no option to work from home. We wrote software that would eventually be burned onto disks. Whatever we used for source code control was quite primitive. Seeing your work go "live" would take months. We were working on cutting-edge stuff (speech recognition in my case) in an environment buzzing with energy and optimism about technology.

Compensation was average: there were no companies with inflated pay packages, so all my engineering friends were paid about the same. Friendly (or not) rivalries were everywhere: Apple vs IBM vs Next vs Microsoft. I'd grown up imagining Cupertino as a magical place and I finally got to work in the middle of it. After the internet, the get-rich-quick period launched by Netscape's IPO, the business folks took over and it's never been the same.