It wasn't really that clear-cut. I started in Ops in the '90s, too, in SV, and there were plenty of SAs I knew who were proud of the fact that they weren't coders. Yes, they knew the shell, and maybe they knew a tiny bit of Perl. But as a guy who was an SA and a coder (Perl, C) I was a rarity.

I still am, but the "DevOps Movement" is here to point out that this artificial dichotomy is considered harmful.