When I first started in my career in 1997, the only option for a workplace was in the office. And before you ask, yes, the internet “existed” back then. But in no way did my first company have (or could afford) a means to allow access from outside to the IT network. This was a very small company (12 employees total on my first day), and there were simply too many constraints. Most homes were still on dial-up internet, the office “network” was a tower computer under the IT/Lead Plumbing Engineer’s desk, and the company owners were old-school. We’ll get more into that topic a little later.
My next company was larger, with about 90-95 total employees. We were large enough to have two people dedicated to IT. Technology was just starting to allow the possibility of working outside the office. The internet was still not capable of information transfer at a rate suitable for any level of ACAD work (Revit didn’t exist yet, this was 2001). The only way we could work outside of an office was to download a file to a hard disc on a laptop with the required software to work, and then sync with the network the next morning. This basically limited your work capabilities to word processing only since laptops could not support ACAD software at the time.