This made me feel really old. 😄

I was programming for a long time before search engines existed - even before the Internet - before open source as well.

Imagine only having access to hard-copy documentation for everything, and really nothing else. And not much documentation at that.

Sometimes hard-to-find bugs would stop a project dead for months in a row, even with a talented engineering team. You would do crazy things like decompile the assembly code of libraries and read through it.

To be honest, I don't even remember the appearance of Stack Overflow as a big deal! Don't get me wrong, it's my largest individual source of answers for me today, it's great, but the game changer was search engines. (And yes, even Altavista made a huge, huge difference. I saw for the first time in 1995 and I was using it to search for tech answers that same day.)

Thanks for a fun article, but be glad you didn't experience the pre-search-engine days. I've been programming since the 1970s, and I would never ever ever ever go back to those days of frustration and glacial slow progress. I am literally more productive in a day today than I was in a month back then, because our tools are so much better.

Can you believe I spent significant time developing on a computer whose clock speed was 1 megahertz (and was 8-bit too)? I sure can't!