Yeah - people basically had entire applications written in Access - think very simple point-of-sale systems, record keeping tools etc. The downside of course, is that, it ran on a single computer and there wasn't a concept of multi-user systems (or maybe there was and I just wasn't aware of it).

In some ways, it's a hark back to the day of a really 'thick' client that was a server, middleware and client all in one.