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Back in the 90s, we did it a bit like that... only we didn't have git, most of us didn't even know about the VCS that did exist. Before doing something serious, I'd make a manual backup before just editing files directly on prod through SSH. Alarmed? At least I said SSH, and not telnet...

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Unencrypted FTP in our case, over a shared ISDN connection. Copy index.cfm to index.cfm.bak and take a swing. No dev, no staging, just production. We did have regular full backups though. And we took plain text credit cards and put 'em in the database so we could batch them up and send them over a modem to the clearinghouse overnight. Never really got bit bad though as far as we knew and we took hundreds of orders per day.

Wait, is ISDN still a thing?

I'm sure it still exists, for some specialized legacy systems, but I was describing my first programming job in the 90s.

I did this as recently as last week... when we were cleaning up our unused AWS resources, and accidentally jettisoned a reserved IP that an important script was still apparently connecting to for live updates. I got 8 phone calls in 3 minutes at 4:30am while I was sleeping, immediately guessed what had happened, and it was just faster to SSH in from my phone and change the script than get up and open an IDE.

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