15 years ago all I had was a Yamaha keyboard and a cassette recorder. I recall using the 5 track recorder on my PSR-530 to record my early compositions for school and then recording those onto a cassette, and also I made quite an effort to manually write the scores by hand. Recording computers and software did exist back then, but they were highly expensive, and never mind trying to get an actual piano, they were huge and cost several thousands.
Now sonar easily handles all of that, and surprisingly even writes out the score for me too, and I also found a brand new DGX 630 a few years ago for just £415, which was an instant purchase (a bit more for the stool and pedals though).