There were things like IRC and Usenet. But the thing I remember most was books. Lots and lots of books. And doing things like building up a mental model of the

There were things like IRC and Usenet. But the thing I remember most was books. Lots and lots of books. And doing things like building up a mental model of the indexes for their reference sections so I could look things up quickly. And doing something similar for `man`, being able to recite from memory that I wanted `man 3 foo` instead of `man 5 foo`. Having direct access to good reference material was was critical, and often that meant hardcopy.