Home computers came with printed documentation and programming manuals, and later, SDKs came on floppy discs with their own extensive offline documentation. Als

Home computers came with printed documentation and programming manuals, and later, SDKs came on floppy discs with their own extensive offline documentation. Also: lots of print magazines and books, and dialup connections into 'Bulletin Board Systems' existed long before the web became popular. This all means that you often got stuck on a problem for days, only to eventually 'invent' a clever solution that's also been invented by thousands of other programmers ;)