4 ms·

Ask HN: What was it like to be a developer before internet?

9 points by raptorraver 6y ago

simonblack 6y ago
We just had fewer resources. We had to be more self-sufficient. Books were more important. I used to spend somewhere between $200 and $500 a year (maybe more!) on reference and tutorial-style books. CDROMs were the 'downloading' of the 80s and 90s.
- DamonHD 6y ago
  Yep, lots of books and upfront reading, and sweaty-panic reading! I used to have a small collection of well-thumbed reference books that I take with me whatever was my current gig.
  - davismwfl 6y ago
    I recently just gave away a bunch of my old reference books and binders with printed articles or clippings from magazines. Those followed me from job to job early on. To be accurate the internet existed but we didn’t have the web resources, it was quite different. We would also use BBS systems with forums as well as email to communicate with experts etc.
    - simonblack 6y ago
      To be accurate the internet existed but we didn’t have the web resources, 'Store and Forward' via UUCP was my norm around 1991. I remember how our little group of UUCP nodes was so excited when one of our members sent an email from Australia to the States. (And received a reply back!! In only 10 minutes!! WOW!!) I recently just gave away a bunch of my old reference books I have had many cleanups of my reference books and magazines from the 80s-90s era. From about 50 shelf-feet to about 3 shelf-feet. On the other hand I have also re-bought some of those discarded reference books. And several other books are getting very tattered, but still used after 30-odd years.
osipov 6y ago
Having the right person with the right expertise on the team was more important.
jimmyvalmer 6y ago
NCSA Mosaic just dropped when I was a freshman, but technical info on the nascent internet was sparse enough that you were writing code, poorly, from first principles extracted from books (K&R, Unix Programming Environment, Richard Stevens, OReilly). When you hit a snag, your choices were staring futilely at a manpage, or asking the person sitting in the next carrel.
tjr 6y ago
Bought compilers on disks (or tapes or CD-ROMs).
ktpsns 6y ago
Oh yeah, and there were downloadable ebooks (HTML) in the early day of the web too, when landline connection was measured by connection time (so reading online was expensive as hell). I learned HTML/JS/CSS, Perl, PHP, Java, C, Linux, etc. all that way, with ebooks. Was a great time before Stackoverflow, when you really learned concepts, not looked for solutions :-)
chrisbennet 6y ago
Back in 1985 when I started I had the original "The C Programming Language", a book from IBM with the various interrupts to access system resources and the "Pink Shirt" book (be Peter Norton). I once wrote a program in assembler that was 7 bytes long (the executable was 7 bytes) to reset the graphics card. It was great time to be a "programmer" in those days because you got to try so many different things instead of just cutting and pasting something from the internet. A lot of those things failed and you learn a lot from your failures.

9 points by raptorraver 6y ago

We just had fewer resources. We had to be more self-sufficient. Books were more important. I used to spend somewhere between $200 and $500 a year (maybe more!) on reference and tutorial-style books. CDROMs were the 'downloading' of the 80s and 90s.

DamonHD 6y ago
Yep, lots of books and upfront reading, and sweaty-panic reading! I used to have a small collection of well-thumbed reference books that I take with me whatever was my current gig.
- davismwfl 6y ago
  I recently just gave away a bunch of my old reference books and binders with printed articles or clippings from magazines. Those followed me from job to job early on. To be accurate the internet existed but we didn’t have the web resources, it was quite different. We would also use BBS systems with forums as well as email to communicate with experts etc.
  - simonblack 6y ago
    To be accurate the internet existed but we didn’t have the web resources, 'Store and Forward' via UUCP was my norm around 1991. I remember how our little group of UUCP nodes was so excited when one of our members sent an email from Australia to the States. (And received a reply back!! In only 10 minutes!! WOW!!) I recently just gave away a bunch of my old reference books I have had many cleanups of my reference books and magazines from the 80s-90s era. From about 50 shelf-feet to about 3 shelf-feet. On the other hand I have also re-bought some of those discarded reference books. And several other books are getting very tattered, but still used after 30-odd years.

osipov 6y ago

Having the right person with the right expertise on the team was more important.

jimmyvalmer 6y ago

NCSA Mosaic just dropped when I was a freshman, but technical info on the nascent internet was sparse enough that you were writing code, poorly, from first principles extracted from books (K&R, Unix Programming Environment, Richard Stevens, OReilly). When you hit a snag, your choices were staring futilely at a manpage, or asking the person sitting in the next carrel.

tjr 6y ago

Bought compilers on disks (or tapes or CD-ROMs).

ktpsns 6y ago

Oh yeah, and there were downloadable ebooks (HTML) in the early day of the web too, when landline connection was measured by connection time (so reading online was expensive as hell). I learned HTML/JS/CSS, Perl, PHP, Java, C, Linux, etc. all that way, with ebooks. Was a great time before Stackoverflow, when you really learned concepts, not looked for solutions :-)

chrisbennet 6y ago

Back in 1985 when I started I had the original "The C Programming Language", a book from IBM with the various interrupts to access system resources and the "Pink Shirt" book (be Peter Norton). I once wrote a program in assembler that was 7 bytes long (the executable was 7 bytes) to reset the graphics card. It was great time to be a "programmer" in those days because you got to try so many different things instead of just cutting and pasting something from the internet. A lot of those things failed and you learn a lot from your failures.