I'm certainly not saying that nothing happened before PCs, only that when talking about the past, one cannot say "we had X" based simply on whether X existed somewhere in the world, but one must consider also how widespread the usage of X was at the time.
There were gobs of suns and SGI’s in the 80’s on just not at home. Whole lot of Unix work was done before that on pdp11’s and VAXen. Had to dial in or stay late to hack :-).
However, you still need to mind the context.
For instance, there existed computers in 1952.. Saying that "we had computers in 1952" is still right, very few institutions had access to one.
Most people learning to program a computer in 1952 wouldn't actually have regular access to one, they'd do it on paper and SOME of the their programs may actually get shipped off to be actually run. So it'd even be entirely unreasonable to say "We, the people learning to program in 1952, had computers", one may say "We, who were learning to program in 1952 had occational opportunity to have our programs run on a computer"..
Yes, there were lots of nice hardware in the 80s, and LOTS of people working professionally in the field would be using something cheaper and/or older.
In context of my original post, I took issue with op writing that "we had version control", sure, version control exited, but it was not so widely used throughout the industry that it's reasonable to say that we had it, some lucky few did.
