I was one of those guys in 1990... heck I was one of those guys in 1983. But I don't really romanticize it. I still have three shelves full of books, including

I was one of those guys in 1990... heck I was one of those guys in 1983. But I don't really romanticize it. I still have three shelves full of books, including some classics like the 3-vol. Knuth, Abrash's Zen books, the ARM of course, as well as the C++ essentials (Lippman, Meyers, Eckel, etc.), gang of three patterns books, and quite a few others. I spent thousands on books, but I haven't bought a book on programming in something like ten years now. I once paid $140+ for an IBM manual on programming the PC VGA chip. I'm sure I still have it in a box downstairs. I also paid $700 for a 9600 baud modem, and regularly forked over $400+ a month to Compuserve, where I spent time with other geeks on the Computer Language and Dr. Dobbs' Journal forums. Interesting times. It's worth noting that one of the reasons search is in general so important these days is there are so many more things we have to know. If you weren't actually working in those days then you don't realize how comparatively simple it was. There was more complexity on a micro scale, because we were writing compiled code w/o the benefit of all the high level abstractions available now. But on a macro level things were much, much simpler.