Each file was carefully FTP'd from the shared development area to the live site, and then marked off on the sheet with the date that it had been deployed, and with what feature.
Each new deployment meant either adding a new set of rows to the spreadsheet for a new feature, or for updates to existing features going back and finding an earlier instance of the file in the list and bumping the date on that.
Because of the shared nature of the CMS across different websites, we couldn't svn up in the CMS directory without destroying the current known state of the site. We also couldn't svn up outside of the subdirectory we were working on, as everyone else working on that site was working off the same network share. Everything was done very gingerly.
The day one of the developers came up with a method to take a list of files from the spreadsheet, tar them up and FTP them to the server for later extraction, he was overjoyed and very, very proud.
I got out of there, swore off PHP and its community entirely. I got tired of checking for a baseline of automated deployment, automated testing, version control, and individual dev systems at every single job I applied for; Ruby people don't look at you funny when you mention these things.
Addendum: I personally know a developer currently working for a famous local radio brand who directly works on the live website network via an FTP plugin. He has to contend with other developers dumping the contents of archives directly into his public folder.
(For context, this is all in Sydney, Australia.)