That's a pretty good description. And most software back then didn't use nice date utilities, they each had their own inline implementation. So sometimes you had to figure out what they were trying to do in the original code, which was usually written by someone who's not there anymore. But other times it was the most mundane doing the same fix you already did in 200 other programs.

And computer networking, especially the ability to remote into a system and make changes or deliver updates en masse, was nowhere near as robust as it is today meaning a lot of those fixes were done manually.