What did people use to spin up servers quickly before modern DevOps?
I can't imagine installing every software needed to run your app manually on every machine or at least in professional setting.
How did people spin up new servers with exact configuration before say chef (obv docker)?
I'd imagine people wrote shell scripts and ran them which has all commands to install and configure environment, right?
It is relatively recent (20 years) that an individual developer could control the machine they work on; and that 'production' machines have hundreds of dependencies installed to support "your app".
Until those numbers exploded, a script, a list of instructions, or something like kickstart worked fine.
We have traded the complexity of writing code, for the complexity of managing how others code is installed and configured.
A good trade off? Probably in aggregate, but not in the extreme (looking at you, node-js).
No, servers came with PERL and/or PHP, no config necessary.
Machine images, centralised software deployment.
Before yaml became the lowest common denominator industry standard devops programming language, we used big boy pants adult programming languages for automation.