In the late 90's, you would've been forced to have a smaller set of dependencies, both out of necessity and because they didn't exist. In the early Java apps I worked on, we downloaded all the dependencies manually, generally from a shared drive or CVS repo, and put them in our classpath.
Yeah exactly, I would typically have a directory with all the dependencies that I downloaded one by one and use that as part of the classpath, whereas now I do mvn clean install --download-the-internet
