Anyone else remember these? This series was something of a bible here back in the 90's.
Just seeing this made me remember a lot about how reefing was back then. The lighting was very different... we didn't have the correct spectrums available at the time and most tanks you saw had a very yellow/green hue because of the lights. The Iwasaki 6500K bulbs were a game changer for growth, and then you started seeing people trying 20K Radiums and getting wild colors. I rememeber when a piece of green slimer was worth its weight in gold, because most SPS were brown. We didn't know how to color them up.
Also it was very common to see even large reef tanks loaded with caulerpa algae (feather and grape). Chaeto wasn't a thing yet where I lived. We knew the caulerpa could act as a nutrient sink, but we just grew it right in the display... no separate refugium. Lots of people ended up so focused on the caulpera (because they thought it was important for filtration) they would end up with dirty tanks.
In other ways, not much has changed. Kalk is still kalk, skimmers still skim, aiptasia still sucks. The basics I learned when I started still apply, and have outlived many fads that have tried to go against them.