...there was film. When you wanted to look at your pictures, you had to first process the film. Then turn it from a negative into a positive through the magic of chemistry. Up until that point, you were flying blind, so to speak. You kept shooting even though you weren't quite sure if you were exposing correctly, or handling the light well. Sometimes you weren't, which you only discovered after 3 weeks of shooting in a foreign country. More about that on another day.
ISO was usually called ASA and it came in a few standard flavors: 50, 100, 125, 200, 400, 800, 1600 & 3200. But one cared mostly about the 100 - 400 range, anything outside that range either needed a tripod (50) or dirty spectacles to blur the grain (800 and up). Granted, there might have been a certain charm to the fuzzy edges of a night time shoot, but I hated the grain. I also hated shooting only during bright daylight hours, so compromises had to be made.
Grain now translates into noise in the digital world and is directly affected by the quality (read price) of your camera. Lower end cameras like my Fujifilm XE-2 doesn't perform as well at the higher ISO ranges as say a Canon 5D Mk IV does, and I've learned to not go higher than 640 ISO if I'm to be happy with the end result. Here are a couple of examples of analog and digital.
Yes, the images I shot on film almost 20 years ago might have a lot of grain, but I have no regrets. When I look back at some of the photos shot on the early digital cameras from the same time, I'm left with nothing but regret.
The full set of images from this period can be found here.