Things were still hot but there were at least storm clouds on the horizon at that point.
>Everybody looked at my resume and pointed out that I had never stayed at a single job for longer than a year.
A year means that, to exaggerate just a little, you were basically starting to look for a new job as soon as you started the old one. But, yeah, if someone has moved between jobs like clockwork every year or two, the working assumption of the hiring manager has to be that this time won't be the charm and you'll hop again. Whether they're OK with that doubtless depends on the role.
You might consider just leaving those right out of school jobs from 20 years ago off. If someone really wants to see them, you can tell them but it's not unreasonable to age stuff off your resume if you have lots of jobs.
Well, with any luck I won't need to look for a new job any time soon ;)
Not OP, but I did some job-hopping right after college in the late 90's. That was a glorious damned time to be a programmer: I doubled my salary twice in four years, changing jobs four times between 1995 and 1999. Then, around early 2000, I decided it was time to do it again (I was young and inexperienced, and it never occurred to me that anybody would have a problem with me job hopping). All of a sudden, I found it really hard to find a new position. Everybody looked at my resume and pointed out that I had never stayed at a single job for longer than a year. I did finally find something, and started staying at jobs for much longer periods of time (four years is my shortest stint since), but when my last company shut down suddenly and I found myself looking again, the four-jobs-in-four-years from 20 years ago came up as a negative in the interview process again.