also, to a much larger degree than today you could do your job with K&R (or the equivalent for one of the other 3 environments you might use) and man pages. by

also, to a much larger degree than today you could do your job with K&R (or the equivalent for one of the other 3 environments you might use) and man pages. by spending (wasting) a lot of time you eventually figured out the nuances of the systems you were using and that was it. this model of gluing together several large undocumented packages just wouldn't work - because you couldn't debug by just typing error messages and pathologies into google