Most of the scripts I was familiar with from that time were one-offs. The code wasn't very reusable. They were automating a task on one machine. Today's "DevOps" are automating things across N machines. It is a matter of scale.

> They were automating a task on one machine.

Remember that in those days you likely only had one machine. By "you" I mean the whole department. Everyone was logged into it and it handled email, talk, documents, compilation and debugging, etc.

That doesn't take away from the fact that the sysadmins were automating everything they needed to do, in the enviornment that existed.

Exactly - I used to be the sysadm on a single machine in a medical laboratory in the 90s. It was a DG Aviion and with the storage unit took up a whole room. Maybe 300 people used it simultaneously.

The idea that I would need to automate the installation of an OS and applications on a fleet of machines was never contemplated because it didn’t make sense. I had one machine and OS upgrades arrived in the post every 6 months or so - on cartridge tape.

It was about need, not competence.

The places I'm talking about were mid 90's, dozens of AlphaServers, Sun Sparcs, HP/UX systems, IBM AIX machines, etc. It was more than a single machine, but less than 50. There was shocking little automation. Everything was a pet, with crazy NFS mounts all over the place, custom scripts in /usr/local/etc not in version control, etc. If there was ever a power loss, it was a pain getting everything back up.

I think we’re talking passed each other by talking different eras.

I worked in the mid-00s and it wasn’t a lot better in the dev space. People passing USB keys to each other was pretty common, SVN and CVS were around but there was a lot of developer code outside of it and peer review was going to someone’s desk and walking through the new code, nothing at all like what we have today for processing change requests.

You’re talking about systems administration when it was going from pets to cattle, the primordial period where people were automating but not applying software development practices on themselves yet because even the software development practices weren’t well defined.

Sysadmin was always lagging 5y behind development w.r.t. programming practises. The same is true today of devops.

tell me how many terraform repositories have unit tests or infra scripts for that matter which would be much simpler.

Yes, I think you are right. The era I'm recounting is from roughly 1995 to 2001-ish at various local ISPs and medium size dev shops.

I did know some fantastic sysadmins at a local university around that time period. They had huge labs of Alphas and Suns and automated everything! Unfortunately, those folks didn't go into industry.

Yes - I was talking early 90s, certainly pre-1995. There was certainly a rough period after that as the internet emerged, and I do remember being frustrated that there weren’t better tools for deploying and maintaining servers in the various ISPs I worked in. As a developer I wrote some tools to help the sysadms but it was a difficult period and I’m not sure that period has really finished yet which might be why AWS has become so popular.

The closest I’ve seen to devops nirvana has been NixOS, but its frustratingly divergent terminology and file formats make it very hard to cross the chasm.

Eh, nah, not exactly, back in the day people would do stuff via install scripts in Debian/RH packages, or before that, in Makefiles. You'd encounter a lot of that stuff back in the day. It always sucked. But it was there.