Yes, absolutely. But it was solid Unix OS with excellent documentation. I also worked for the CS department. We installed software centrally to an NFS server which was then automounted. We used something called "depot" from CMU to setup a software depot:
The biggest PITA about this scheme at the time was that you wanted "make install" to put software in one location (/depot/...), but you wanted that software to have paths compiled in as if it were in a different location (/usr/local/...). For the most part, the Makefiles that came with open source software then just weren't designed that way. You could set PREFIX but it was used for both the compiled-in paths as well as where "make install" put things. I recall spending a lot of time wrestling things into the depot scheme.
Seems absurdly over-engineered looking at it now.
Later in my career, I spent a lot of time building RPMs which was similarly painful but got easier over time.
https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=82134...
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/.cs.cmu.edu/help/content/unix_lin...
The biggest PITA about this scheme at the time was that you wanted "make install" to put software in one location (/depot/...), but you wanted that software to have paths compiled in as if it were in a different location (/usr/local/...). For the most part, the Makefiles that came with open source software then just weren't designed that way. You could set PREFIX but it was used for both the compiled-in paths as well as where "make install" put things. I recall spending a lot of time wrestling things into the depot scheme.
Seems absurdly over-engineered looking at it now.
Later in my career, I spent a lot of time building RPMs which was similarly painful but got easier over time.
Software packaging... fun times.