Wellll, it was quite a few years decades ago, so memory is a little fuzzy: I'm guessing we were taught to do multiplication and division before addition and subtraction, but I think that was about it. Never heard any mnemonics like BODMAS back then. (Would have been helpful for sure, like "Roy G. Biv" which I do remember from back then.)
Yeah, it was quite a few decades ago for me too, and I don't remember any mnemonics at that time either. BODMAS, PEMDAS, they seem to be new-fangled things that only became apparent in the Internet age. I do remember SOHCAHTOA though.
However, the order of operations, where you do powers first, then multiplication, then addition, was an elementary thing taught in the very first algebra class. It was about the second thing taught after the introduction of using letters to represent numbers.