A lot of responses have mentioned usenet so I won't repeat. However, one very important aspect of usenet was the curated FAQ document of the newsgroups (e.g.,

A lot of responses have mentioned usenet so I won't repeat. However, one very important aspect of usenet was the curated FAQ document of the newsgroups (e.g., a FAQ for comp.lang.c [1]). The document was maintained by the newsgroup maintainers and would be of very high quality, informative and with it's own unique sense of (geek?) humor. I have pored over pages of such documents and have learned a ton and enjoyed doing it. Interestingly, I remember reading somewhere that stackoverflow.com was developed to eliminate some of the problems associated with maintaining a usenet newsgroup FAQ, e.g., through automatic and community-driven curation, although at this point, it seems like that kind of feature is either not used or not considered super-important. (well, in a way, that's what it's doing, but the final product is access to the answers through google search, not a single FAQ document). [1] http://c-faq.com/ http://c-faq.com/ [2] a tiny list of comp.* newsgroups (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comp.*_hierarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comp.*_hierarchy) P.S.: Another important resource (in use in the past as well as in the present): irc.freenode.net chatrooms.