My Dad, still programming at 72, was one of the first people I know of to work as a remote developer. From about 1982 We lived on a remote-ish farm in Australia and out in the shed we had an IBM mainframe with a bunch of terminals and PCs on makeshift tables made from doors resting on filing cabinets. A couple of times a year some of his colleagues from the UK would fly out from the UK with a bag of tapes of source code, they would spend the next month merging their code and planning the next few months work.