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 prin

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.