We messed around and discovered neat hacks. From those hacks we expanded on the concepts and developed more robust things. Resources were programmers referenc

We messed around and discovered neat hacks. From those hacks we expanded on the concepts and developed more robust things. Resources were programmers reference guides, technical publications (i.e. BYTE in the 80s, Dr. Dobb's Journal) Lots of snacks and hours bashing code. If you look at a lot of the games of the time some programmer would figure out say a cool looking jump for a game character, and from that build it into a platformer. Same with productivity someone devises a faster method to edit a file bigger then system memory and bases a new word processor on that. So in today's world it's pretty much the same thing; you see a technology and figure out how to improve upon it, try to adapt it to your platform of choice (and employ new methods), or stumble upon some other idea while messing around and you build from that. There's a lot more resources to build and bolster your concepts now then there was back in the 80s - that's for sure.