Stack Overflow wasn't around for sooo long. I remember after it first came about and everyone jumped onboard and it's hard to remember how we lived without it,

Stack Overflow wasn't around for sooo long. I remember after it first came about and everyone jumped onboard and it's hard to remember how we lived without it, but before then we had Expertsexchange and blogs from various evangelists from companies and we also had this acronym to live by RTFM... which we did, rigorously. When we didn't understand something, we pestered our professors, consulted other books, Google'd for it or jumped on IRC and asked other programmers who would always be quick to reply RTFM... until you'd been around long enough to proven yourself not to ask questions that could've easily been answered with some rudimentary reading. Before the internet though, it was all books and hacking to see what you could figure out on your own... and if you couldn't figure it out on your own, you were pretty much done. So then StackOverflow came around and none of us have looked back since.