i used to bring people to a hilly cow pasture all the time and let them shoot my rifle at 1000 yards
That’s how I started in LR, but it was a big longer ago than just a decade. But out in the Midwest, we have a lot more space with a lot fewer houses around, so it’s pretty easy for hillbillies with rifles to look at wide open fields and wonder how far they could shoot across it.
Admittedly, we were using rifles and kit that I’d never use today, and it wasn’t a controlled and calculated activity, but starting when I would have been 10-12, so early 1990’s, my uncles, dad, and I would drive out into cattle pastures and hang an old car door on a hedge fence post by a dog chain, lean an old Chevy hood up against the next post beside it, then drive across the pasture until the guy riding in the bed told us to stop at 500yrds, then they’d jump out and we’d drive further while he lasered the truck, until he waved to stop - since his Leupold LRF only reached 500 on big targets, if we wanted to go farther, he’d have to again stand at that mark and laser the truck as we drove out farther… then we’d lay in the bed with sporterized Mausers and R700’s in long action and magnum cartridges, SFP Leupolds with Mil-dot reticles and 1/4moa capped dials - not even turrets! - socks full of playsand or lima beans, wholly reliant upon printed data tables from bullet manufacturers to back our way into tried BC’s and muzzle velocities, and watching knee deep pasture grass for wind estimation. When I was younger still, we’d run 100ft tape measures in the fields, or rely upon fence lines and tree rows to define 400yrd ranges, and shoot at old disc blades - but when my uncle eventually bought a laser rangefinder so we could measure past 300-400 without stringing tape for an hour, the game was on! It would have been 1998 or 1999 that I bought an R700 in 7x57 and loaded it to “.308 win pressures,” and really thought I had the long range thing figured out, because I could hit a truck door at 1,000 yards “most of the time.” About the same time one of my (decade older) cousins had built a heavy barreled, fast twist 25-06 with a Shilen barrel on a Win70, and I eventually picked up a Sendero in 7RM to outrun him…
All of that was a long time before the PRS, but all we were doing is laying in truck beds or on old quilts on hilltops in cattle pastures, shooting at huge targets with poorly devised gear. So it’s maybe not fair to imply long range shooting is new, but it’s certainly fair to give credit that - HOW EASY IT IS TODAY - to deliver precision at long range is completely different than it was 20-30yrs ago.