Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

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- Books. Usually just "book" given a particular language. There wasn't a breadth of material available, so you had to rely on your critical thinking and reasoning skills much more.

- Paper programming magazines that came out monthly. These normally had articles that centered around a program you would type in manually from the pages of the magazine.

- In-person user group meetups. These were pretty entertaining and full of brilliant basement dwellers with entertaining and non-normal personalities.

- BBSes (social networking)

Ah, the 1970s and 1980s. Imagine a world with no cell phones or Internet. How are you going to get your debugging help now? StackOverflow doesn't exist.

To add to this list:

- Manuals. Reading carefully through the documentation was necessary for mastery. Both hardware and software. These were often closely associated-- you couldn't always just concentrate on one and abstract away the other.

  How are you going to get your debugging help now? StackOverflow doesn't exist.

Real Men and Real Women read core dumps. And they actually communicated with each other.

Plus, turnover was less, so you had institutional knowledge over long periods maintained by peers and clients alike.

In the mainframe environment in which I worked, we had a lot of company-specific and proprietary systems and tools that outsiders couldn't have helped with, anyway. And they beat the crap out of IBM's packages.

And no live Internet connection doesn't preclude dial-up.

And IBM tended to document the hell out of their stuff.

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