Ask HN: What was programming like before internet?

- Books. Usually just &quot;book&quot; given a particular language. There wasn&#x27;t a breadth of material available, so you had to rely on your critical thinking and reasoning skills much more.<p>- Paper programming magazines that came out monthly. These normally had articles that centered around a program you would type in manually from the pages of the magazine.<p>- In-person user group meetups. These were pretty entertaining and full of brilliant basement dwellers with entertaining and non-normal personalities.<p>- BBSes (social networking)

We got hired through want-ads in the local papers, or through headhunters (once we became known). We read paper documentation. That was slower.<p>I learned C by reading K&amp;R. I learned Pascal by reading an equivalent book, though I can&#x27;t remember who wrote it. I learned Basic by reading the TRS-80 Basic manual. I learned 68000 assembler by reading Motorola&#x27;s 68000 book. And so on.<p>I remember the day the hard drive on the development system died. How did we find a replacement? Yellow pages to find companies that were plausible, then calling them to find out if they had what we needed.<p>Everything moved slower. But the people you competed against were also moving slower...

You didn&#x27;t ask about this, but a salient point to me: when programs were created on punched cards in the early 70&#x27;s, and you had to wait 15 minutes to an hour for a single compile, you spent a lot of time proofreading your source code before submitting it. You designed and coded the entire program in advance, none of this programming by accretion that is so common now. And we became quite skilled at finding our own errors before submitting code to the compiler. The current approach of letting the compiler lead you by the nose from one error to the next seems horribly inefficient to me, and results in a higher defect rate in the finished product.

Both software and hardware tended to come with much better and more complete documentation than today (things didn&#x27;t change as fast as they do now, so printed documentation stayed relevant much longer than it would do now). As a teenager I learned a lot from the pretty detailed books on MS-DOS and GW-BASIC that come with our PC XT clone, for example.<p>Then there were 3rd party books, sometimes very good ones. And magazines, some of which were very good too.

Books, magazines (BYTE, Nibble[0], Dave Ciarcia&#x27;s Circuit Cellar), computer camps, BBS. But because there were so few resources, they tended to be FAR higher quality than googling or Stack Overflow. Plus things weren&#x27;t as complex back then: you could memorize the 6502 instruction map in an afternoon.<p>The only way I really learned was by saving my money (returning soda cans and mowing lawns) and buying MULTIPLE books on the same subject because the examples or explanations differed enough to triangulate WTF was going on.<p>Nibble magazine had source code in it every month for the Apple that explained how stuff worked. I once typed in 14 pages of assembly to write a space-invader&#x27;s game. Most of it was bitmaps.<p>When I was 13 I won a scholarship to a computer camp and spent a month with experts who answered every question I had and taught me how to debug. It expanded my knowledge 1e6%.<p>I&#x27;m a late-70&#x27;s kid. I grew up near Yale University I bought programming books from the Yale Co-op book store with allowance money.<p>I started with BASIC on a relative&#x27;s C64, then got into 6502 assembly[1] on the school Apple computers[2], then bought a book on 286 protected mode when I got to highschool. Then I worked for a machinist who taught me C in the mid-80&#x27;s.<p>It was really hard without a network of experts to reach out to.<p>I still a have the latter two books, below, with my big, goofy-kid handwriting in them:<p>[0] Nibble mag ... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nibblemagazine.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nibblemagazine.com&#x2F;</a><p>[1] 6502 Software Gourmet Guide &amp; Cookbook, Robert Findly ... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;6502-software-gourmet-guide-cookbook&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B0006EAKSM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;6502-software-gourmet-guide-cookbook&#x2F;...</a><p>[2] Beneath Apple DOS, by Don Worth and Pieter Lechner ... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Beneath-Apple-DOS-Don-Worth&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0912985003&#x2F;ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&amp;keywords=Beneath+Apple+DOS%2C+by+Don+Worth+and+Pieter+Lechner&amp;qid=1590876003&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Beneath-Apple-DOS-Don-Worth&#x2F;dp&#x2F;091298...</a>

I had a dumb terminal with a dial-up modem in 1976. I learned from books, classes at colleges, mentors. Employers recruited through newspapers and recruiters, I got jobs through word of mouth and asking everyone I knew. Nerds would meet up to exchange information. We had magazines like Computerworld.

I worked on VAX in the eighties and took the knowledge from hundreds of the famous VAX manuals. They must have cleared whole forests for these manuals. Tons of paper that filled all the walls and rooms. And of course a lot of paper books.<p>And the keyboards were big and loud. And there were only a few lines on the terminal screen.<p>And when you printed out a listing, you had to walk a few hundred meters to the data center (called &quot;Rechenzentrum&quot;) to pick up the stack of paper at the counter.<p>Even today, in the age of the WWW, I still have thousands of books as PDF with a local search engine. There is still plenty of (important) information that you can&#x27;t just access over the Internet.

This isn&#x27;t about &quot;pre-internet&quot; but one of the things I miss about developing Java SE &#x2F; J2ME code is that as long as you had a local copy of the Java API javadoc you could work offline.<p>I really miss that.

When you say internet, I&#x27;m going to say you really meant the world wide web? Before college of a books, magazines, and BBSes. I almost got an internship job at compuserve. But it was across town, and I couldnt afford the gas. In college it was the usenet. One of my first jobs, I called the help lin, for the mini we had, more than I would have liked. I asked stupid questions that I would find on stack overflow today.

&gt; Who hired you? Pre-internet, nobody. Professional computer nerds did hardware. I was a screwup kid only interested in bad ideas from other screwup kids with modems.<p>&gt; What did you work on? The internet. We had dial-up BBSs and some pay services, mostly to distribute text files. I spent most of my time writing peer-to-peer networking, distributed file storage, and p2p content discovery. &gt; How did you Learn?<p>The book that came with the compiler and&#x2F;or IDE was usually excellent and all you needed. I tried reading Dr Dobbs, but that was usually closer to hardware, and way over my head. There were all these books full of prose that I didn’t care about. I just wanted code to get things done.<p>&gt; How did you fix issues? Change. Compile. Error message. Repeat.<p>&gt; How did you find talent? Kids that swapped floppies at school. Started with txtz, then pr0n, then warez, then c0dez.<p>&gt; War stories? Lots of screwup kid stuff learned from txtz like making bombs and drugs. Password stealing worms. Eventually pioneered the click fraud worm at the beginning of the internet and that was the end of it for me.

Writing code in a commercial IT shop in the late seventies, the manager though he was progressive since he guaranteed that we could get as many as one compilation per day. We&#x27;d submit punched cards and get back the card deck and a compile listing when it was done.<p>Hardware was less reliable, occasionally coming up with the wrong results. One time the result was wrong because the printer had printed the wrong digit! I&#x27;d spent hours desk checking the code only to find the code was right. So I ran it again.<p>It was much more normal for managers to really not know what a computer really is. This included programming and IT managers. One very accomplished boss asked me, in a meeting, how long it took to write a program. What kind of program? I asked. Oh, a general program. That put me in a no-win situation. If I said a year, he&#x27;d pop a cork and get all red-faced. If I said two weeks, he&#x27;d hold me to it no matter what the program was supposed to do.

&gt; I was hired as a physicist with requirement for some programming. Almost immediately I was a programmer with a bit of physics.<p>&gt; I first worked on surface acoustic waves for signal processing - most computational intensive part of the business. Other teams were laying out chips with Rubylith.<p>&gt; Learnt by doing, occasional mentoring from more experienced team member, reading the manual.<p>&gt; A lot of issue fixing was done by poring over printouts. A lot of trial and error.<p>&gt; I didn&#x27;t do talent hunting in those days.<p>&gt; News was in journal articles, &#x27;trade&#x27; magazines, user groups (proceedings distributed on magnetic tapes).<p>We had terminals connected to our main computer, a connection to a remote university computer (slow) and networks to other sites within the business. New software would be delivered on magnetic tape, also used for backup. Some measurement data was transferred via paper tape.<p>Data was mostly measured, processed and printed out. Archive versions of code were stored on printout.

I&#x27;d just like to mention that the time between the internet and the web was a few decades for some people and was quite different than &quot;the Internet&quot; today.<p>You had a Terminal, then maybe a workstation on your desk and lastly a PC and modem at home.. News groups and irc, ftp and muds over telnet, then eventually gopher.. If you had no academic affiliations you might use independent BBSes or communicate over an alliance of them that exchanged mail.<p>Many things could be downloaded eventually, but large things like compilers and OSes and their updates might come on tape..<p>Even once the web was running, it was not evenly distributed even in corporations and we would fax faq contents to common OS problems to workers who had large disconnected networks. These still exist for security reasons today, but those workers at least have web access when they leave their sites.

The first computer program was transmitted through the postal network.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bl.uk&#x2F;collection-items&#x2F;letter-from-ada-lovelace-to-charles-babbage" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bl.uk&#x2F;collection-items&#x2F;letter-from-ada-lovelace-...</a>

Programming before the internet required tenacy&#x2F;grit. You had not Stack Exchange sites and no Google to find solutions to known problems, you had to solve everything yourself. You could visit a friend and show your code, usually as print-out or loading it from a floppy disk. You&#x27;d learn programming by reading a book, by subscribing magazones and by hanging out with people that can programm better than you.<p>Software would be distributed in print magazines for you to key in, either in a language like BASIC or Turbo Pascal, or in many pages of hexadecimal numbers that represent the binary executible (sometimes with a check sum, sometimes without).

I used to bring the C64 Programmer&#x27;s Reference Guide to our community pool to read in between the pool, games of Zaxxon, and eating Combos.

No stackoverflow meant deciphering manpages or asking the guy sitting next to you. You can imagine how ugly things got.

I met my wife in college where we were to only ones that taught ourselves &#x27;C&#x27; from K&amp;R. (Mid 80’s)

You couldn&#x27;t Google the answer so you needed (and were allowed to) try stuff. I think this exploration was an invaluable part of my experience. I learned so much from what <i>didn&#x27;t</i> work. We don&#x27;t have that luxury anymore - you just Google the best answer.

I taught myself programming. * Lots of grit. You needed it, to stay in the game when your shit didn&#x27;t work. * Type-in programs from books, magazines (3-2-1 Contact). * Later on, buying big reference books. * Trial and error, lots of it.

I discovered computers when starting high school. We had computers that used floppy diskettes 5 1&#x2F;4&quot; TRS-80 or 8&quot; Wang (yes like in the Simpsons).<p>We also had a computer not in our building where we would code programs in pencil onto cards (like multiple-choice answers) that would be taken away and run overnight. You received your syntax errors the next day so there was incentive to double-check.<p>That pretty much sucked so I got an Atari 8-bit computer with the Basic and Asteroids cartridges. The basic book came with simple instructions. Enough that I could write my own lunar surface generator (2D using graphic characters) and lander game.<p>Over the years learned from magazines like Creative Computing, Compute!, Antic, Byte, Dr Dobbs.<p>My big break was getting a floppy drive to save programs (before that I had to turn off the computer losing my work to play Asteroids which invariably happened regardless of how many days I spent writing the current program). I also got Galactic Chase and Macro Assembler (with Medit a full screen editor). Before that I was making strings of extended characters in Basic that contained manually translated machine instructions to execute. You allocate the string that ends in a &quot;RTS&quot; return from subroutine, get its address and jump-subroutine to it.<p>After getting bits and pieces of hardware graphics info from magazines, I got my hands on the legendary &quot;de re Atari&quot; which pretty much explained everything, or at least started to so you could follow up. After that my friends and I made an endless number of games. Even then I enjoyed making the game building tools (character set editors, sprite editors, level editors) more fun than playing the games.<p>Then I got paid to write a stock-keeping program for a stereo&#x2F;jewellery store in the mall with CompuPlace where I hung out. That was CP&#x2F;M running dBase II. Wrote an inventory program for CompuPlace with machine-code compressed in-memory sort with memory bank switching (so like a merge sort). Automated some record keeping for an Italian immigration assistance shop run by a priest, discovering espresso. Then I started university co-op. Wrote some mini, mainframe, Vax assembler routines, COBOL, microcode macros for terminals.<p>My real education didn&#x27;t happen until I worked as a co-op for a communications&#x2F;graphics company called Eicon Technology in Montreal. Read the K&amp;R C book, wrote programs using MS C Compiler v3 and v4 (woohoo CodeView). I wrote an interpreter for the HP PCL language used by LaserJets to be firmware for Eicon&#x27;s laser engine products.<p>I have a few good stories. I was working late at the office one night and the office got a call. We had phones at our desks with all the line buttons so I answered it. One of our developers in the Vancouver office doing a high profile project with IBM had just somehow lost the hard drive partition with all their latest work. There were lots of undelete tools at the time, but this was an IBM project--they were using OS&#x2F;2 with HPFS formatted drives. I figured that there were identically configured hardware so I instructed the guy, over the phone, to use the copy of the DOS Norton Utility that I sent him, again over phone modem, to copy some sectors from any random computer with the same OS and hard disk size. While working late at the office, I would often read the books on our shelves, one of them happened to detail the internals of HPFS and I&#x27;d recently read it. HPFS has multiple boot sectors at the beginning of the disk, then central directory in the middle of the disk (to save on seek time), then data bands with local allocation info. I just wanted to copy the initial boot and central directory from one machine to the other. Of course all the filenames and allocation would be garbage, but it would at least know it had a filesystem and the size of it. There was some &quot;systeminternals&quot; tools that could be downloaded from various BBSes and one of them happened to be an HPFS directory rebuilder. I think we had to boot OS&#x2F;2 off of several floppies to get to a command prompt to run that. After maybe an hour of running, the data was back. Got the news, was surprised to hear it worked as well as it did. They owed me beer and Mongolian grill when I came to visit.

A small number of books, lots of magazines, and simply spending time with machines just trying things and figuring them out.<p>As a teenager, I had about 2-3 people to talk to about computers, and no-one who could program like I could.<p>At 10 I got to play with a BBC micro, then at 11, I was lucky to get one of my own. Around the same time, I discovered the BBC Micro Advanced Users Manual, a book which was banned in the school computer room for unclear reasons.<p>It was chock full of commands for the ROM, things like how to draw, programming the sound controller, how to work with the video chip, the A&#x2F;D converters, etc. Looking back that was a very good ROM and a very good book for someone like me learning.<p>In the back was a two page table listing the 6502 mnemonics and opcodes. But it didn&#x27;t say what any of the instructions did!<p>It took me a while to guess what things like ADC, LDX, TXA etc. meant and it was really exciting to have the ideas fall into place, as if by magic as the guesses worked out.<p>The BBC was unusual in having a built-in assembler, embedded into BBC BASIC, so it was easy to try instructions.<p>This was awesome for learning assembly as a child, and it meant I ended up learning assembly less than a year after touching a computer for the first time.<p>There were absolutely no books from the local library that helped with computers. And no bookshops. It was that manual (as well as the non-advanced manual), a couple of Ladybird books about the basics of how computers work and logic gates, and... lots and lots of magazines. Computer magazines were almost everything, I had boxes of them by the end. I&#x27;m sure I learned a lot from them, especially C++, although I didn&#x27;t have anything powerful enough to compile C, let alone C++. The low-level technical stuff wasn&#x27;t really covered; I had to figure that out myself. But there was a lot of game listings you could type in and learn from.<p>(There was one book from the library about PAL colour TV that I kept taking out though, because PAL encoding is so fascinating and subtle, and it described it both mathematically and in great detail the analogue circuits that implemented it all.)<p>I wrote a lot of games, clever demos, and several little OSes as a teenager (for different machines). Since there was no internet (that I knew about) and I had no modem, and couldn&#x27;t have afforded the phone calls if I did anyway, for the most part I&#x27;m the only person who used my work at the time, but some of the games, demos and cracks were used by others.<p>Much of my time was spent cracking games, and some of them had fancy copy protection schemes and strange tape modulations (we loaded things from cassette tape), so there were a lot of puzzles to solve.<p>I ported a few games from machine to machine, just for interest. But a couple in particular I put a lot of effort into. Starquake was a fun Spectrum game that I reimplemented on the BBC, but ultimately didn&#x27;t share with anyone. Impossaball nearly earned me some cash, but it didn&#x27;t work out as the company decided they were leaving the BBC market, shortly after they&#x27;d agreed to buy it from me :&#x2F;<p>In those days, chips in computers did just what they needed to when programmed just right, and did all sorts of strange things when programmed differently. So another bit of fun, that demoscene folks will recognise, is that if you poke video chips in various &quot;unspecified&quot; ways or at critical times to exact clock cycle, they malfunction in interesting ways.<p>On the BBC that got me a high-res full-colour display which was &quot;impossible&quot; (therefore good for the Starquake port), smooth scrolling which was also &quot;impossible&quot;, and mode 7 multi-colour text without gaps between letters - that&#x27;s enough to do syntax highlighting which I never saw anyone do on it :-)<p>One of the most memorable things for me from that time, was printing out the full disassembly of Elite (Disk version) on dot matrix, and poring over it to completely understand how the game worked. I&#x27;m not sure how many pages that was, but the stack of paper was about an inch thick and filled my bedroom when unfolded. I learned a lot from that; it was a rich game, full of tricks.<p>It turns out I couldn&#x27;t actually play the game properly until I modified it anyway, as I had a &quot;Torch&quot; BBC Micro, which had a different keyboard mapping than the standard BBC, so I had to modify the game before I could play it as it was meant to be played.<p>My &quot;not quite BBC&quot; machine had a 6502, Z80 and 68000 CPU attached, so in a peculiar way I got to write for all three CPUs and do some things that were, in retrospect, very unusual for their time. At various times I was running ZX Spectrum (Z80) and Atari&#x2F;Amiga (68000) game code on my BBC (6502), in a way that is akin to emulation, and remarkably for some things it sort of worked. I also built a crude floppy disk controller in discrete logic (74LS devices) on a breadboard so I could read Amiga floppies, because ordinary floppy controllers couldn&#x27;t read its unusual format.<p>Then I went to university at 18, and within a month discovered the internet using the Sun machines there.<p>I say within a month, because it was a <i>secret</i> internet: Undergraduates were not supposed to have access, and we were not even told the internet existed.<p>I found the internet <i>entirely by accident due to running an Emacs command</i>...<p>And when administation found out, they took it away.... but felt pity and let me have access again as long as I didn&#x27;t tell other people. It was read-only, I wasn&#x27;t allowed to post anything.<p>That&#x27;s when I started to learn Lisp, C and Unix on Sun workstations...<p>The main source of knowledge was Emacs&#x27; own built-in documentation, Sun man pages, GNU info, and other people&#x27;s source code (usually GNU) because I could download packages over FTP, even if I couldn&#x27;t talk to anyone writing it.<p>Eventually we were all allowed to use the internet, so Usenet was all the rage, people joined MUDs, and a couple of years later this thing called NCSA Mosaic came out.<p>About then, some guy called Linus posted on comp.os.minix that he was writing a toy kernel...

MSDN Library on CD anyone?