I remember working on board repair in the early 90s, then surface mount stuff started to pop in. Equipment at the time was literally $10k in today's dollars, at least that was the figure everyone talked about ($5k-ish).

I remember attaching a thin copper wire to my soldering iron, wrapping it around the tip and then out the front, and using that to work on those tiny pads. Sort of worked. Didn't even have solder tape, just a sucker.

I didn't even understand how a hot air station worked, until youtube showed me years later (I moved onto the software side). The things people could never find out, never know, never even knew existed pre-Internet are staggering.

I don't think anyone under 30 can even begin to comprehend how limited knowledge was before. Quite often, if you wanted to know something, you literally could not find any info about it at all. You wouldn't even know what to ask, when you approached a librarian, even if they could find some book they could get from an inter-library transfer -- which where I lived, took weeks!

Such a culture shift.

But anyhow, I can imagine I'd have destroyed the board trying to get all that back together, via my soldering-iron with wire on end workaround.