People weren't that much less mobile 20 years ago. And it would have been much harder for many businesses to go virtual relative to today, a lot of online delivery was early days and certainly not at today's scale, etc. So "shelter in place" would probably have been much more limited. 10 years earlier and most of the things that let people stay at home would have been off the table.

20 years ago my boss orders my to work from home the next day because it was important for me to finish a critical piece without the distractions of the office. Of course as a programmer we have always been on the bleeding edge of this just be the fact that until our tools work we can't make anyone else's work.

100 years ago people regularly ordered things for delivery. Sure it wasn't online, but all online gives you is some time.

> 100 years ago people regularly ordered things for delivery.

E.g. "milkman" is a word in English. Today, most people haul their own milk home from the supermarket.

We actually had a milkman for a period when I was growing up.

Certainly, as you go back in time, there was a lot of local delivery especially in urban areas. Mail order, Sears catalog notwithstanding, less so. Just to pick one random example, ordering music, movies, or books pre-Amazon was really pretty limited.

20 years ago, some people could work from home at least some of the time; I did personally (for pretty much the first time). There was fairly decent broadband availability, etc. But just barely. Go back just another 5 years and it gets much harder.

>but all online gives you is some time

And a lot more types of goods available. Again, 25 years ago, it would not have been practical for people to have wholesale pivoted a huge amount of shopping online. (And companies like B&H Photo couldn't have scaled.)

20 years is probably just about the cusp of it barely being possible.