I agree completely on the internet access. Very hard to work through issues without online resources nowadays. How did we do it before there was such great online help like StackExchange?
In some ways I was more productive than before, but I tended to reuse less code, and use less sophisticated algorithms and data structures to solve problems. Having good code around to read became a lot more important, as did having access to good books, and good man pages. (It reminded me why I loved OpenBSD so much in the 90s)
The most positive thing that came out of it was reading a lot more code; I realized one of the habits that had diminished most since sometime in the last decade was the habit of reading the source code for something when I had a problem with it, instead of immediately googling it.
It made me think that maybe younger programmers should try working without a connection now and then (say, for a week at a time). Also that open source has really changed things; there's so much stuff that I don't even think about writing myself now, because I know someone out there has already written and open sourced.
Books. And if you were lucky you would buy 2 or 3 so you could triangulate something that didn't make sense. At least that is what I did.
Also plenty of trying and iteration.
Try this.
Try that.
For hours on end. (Not sure by your question if you had done this or were just asking btw.).
When I bought a Unix system (mid 80's) it came with a bound set of maybe 10 manuals iirc. Getting other books was difficult I had to drive miles to a University bookstore to even find anything on Unix or C. Software wasn't free of course. It cost real dollars and was pretty expensive and came on floppies.
A few years ago I built this php/mysql just to store things that I learned or figured out (correct syntax for rsync might be an example) so I wouldn't have to re google them. [1] But now what I'm seeing is that most things can be found by google quicker than in the format I am using the db for. (But it's still helpful because I can cut paste and edit). I also use a wiki to keep track of what I have found that is helpful. Putting something in the wiki seems to help a little.
My point is in the past there would have been much more memorization reinforcement (see [1] below) than today. My brain is totally getting lazy because it knows the answer is right at my fingertips one way or another. When I used to do the 3x5 cards [1] I typed it up, printed it, reduced it, pasted it and the act of creating and using those "flash" cards made me memorize the answers.
The other problem is the flood of information. To many cool and interesting things to test out and get the hang of. I remember back when I tried C for the first time (don't even think there was c++). Could work with that for a long time since there wasn't really anything else to play with. [2]
[1] Old way of doing this used to be 3x5 cards or those 8.5 x 11 plastic (can't think of the actual word for it) cheat sheets like "Unix Quick Reference". See: http://www.bookdepository.com/Unix-Inc-Barcharts/97815722239...
[2] I'm not a programmer but I do some programming to help with what I do. And have been doing it for a long time. So perhaps if I was doing this full time and my needs were different (instead of intermittent) this would be less of an issue for me.
Noting even that when learning php somethings that I cut and pasted had weird invisible embedded characters that caused things to fail [1]. That was actually a pretty good learning experience trying to take something that appeared correct character by character and figure out why it wasn't working by stripping things down the the basics.
[1] Might have been on w3schools or something like that.
But seriously, there are pros and cons with this. On the one hand, by outsourcing certain aspects of memory, we can hold much more. It's kind of like learning to call APIs rather than re-writing everything from scratch. On the other hand, I believe that instant recall has it's advantages. (I think our generation can do math approximations in our head faster than the current generation, and that's an advantage)