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.