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Many of us, older people, had access to similar things that made us interested... in the 70/80's it was computer magazines (paper magazines, that is) as people
by brabel 4y ago
Many of us, older people, had access to similar things that made us interested... in the 70/80's it was computer magazines (paper magazines, that is) as people got their first home computers and could follow along programming examples, play games etc. If you ran into trouble, you needed either help from someone you already knew or you would have to find a book or manual.
In the 90's most teens already had access to a primitive internet where they could chat with anyone in the world using BBS[1], which was not too different from a modern social network. Email was already a thing as well for some time, but probably became widespread at this time... by the late 90's the internet was already quite similar to today for geeks, except perhaps videos (and even high resolution pics) were not a thing due to the low speed of the net.
StackOverflow and GitHub only came around in the late 2000's, which is basically yesterday. Before them, there were similar sites as well (the infamous expertsexchange for SO, and SourceFourge for GH, for example) for quite some time, but they surely became very dominant in their areas.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system
- raincole 4y agoAnd I know these. I'm not "punched card old" but I did start learning programming before SO got traction. And I remember how big the difference SO made for my own learning/career path, compared to mailing lists. As a side note, my first intern job was to make a localized ripoff of SO (within a team, of course). It was still a relatively shining new thing by the time.
- brabel 4y agoCool... it's just that your comment seems to imply that a lot of programmers were learning their basics when SO was already there to help us... that's only true for those of us lucky enough to be really young, like in their 20's :D. Hope you understand many of us are well past that and watched GH and SO take over the world as a very recent phenonenom.
- raincole 4y agoUh, yes, this is why I said "many of us" not "most of us". (not sure why i need to repeat this...) Of course I know people who are in 20s are not necessarily the absolute majority of HN. But there are still many of them.