When I started coding 30 years ago, I didn't have internet, and being a kid living in a remote rural area where even the nearest bookstore is a long drive away - virtually unreachable for a 12 year old - I hardly had any resources available at all. It was both frustrating and exciting.
Every book or tool you could get your hands on was a treasure; and my friends and I, developing primitive adventure games, had to reinvent some wheels in pretty lame ways, like image compression for our backgrounds, or drawing of sprites onto a background.
I once got my hands on a 8086 assembly manual, what a gem that was! but alas, we had no assembler or a C compiler, so we reverted to creating blank files and using DOS' DEBUG.EXE to tweak the assembly from all zeros to whatever we wanted.
It was really exciting although not very "productive". Then one of the guys got a modem and the BBS world opened up to us, and it was never the same again.
Very similar story here, and I share the amazement at my own patience, but then I remember - there was nothing else to do. I was a kid - no car, no job, 3 channels on TV. What else would you have done?
I only started programming at all because the bundle that contained the computer + tape-deck + games had a faulty tape-deck, such that my family couldn't use it.
I spent about four days reading the manual, complete with BASIC tutorial, until the shops opened again and it could be returned & exchanged.
(This would have been in 82-83 or so. When I was 7.)
Books were also so expensive! I remember using the local bookstore as a sort of Google. I would get stuck on a problem, go to the bookstore with pen and paper in hand, and copy down possible solutions.
Definitely not efficient, but the disconnectedness forced thinking about a problem rather than just searching Google.
[Obligatory Monty Python reference] Pen and paper? Luxury! We had to walk 40 miles to the bookstore, in the desert, at night, memorize the solutions, walk back, and be on time for school I tell you!
Haha, I certainly was not walking uphill both ways, and the bookstore was only about a 20 minute drive away :)
But I do think older people have a certain appreciation for the internet and the likes of Google moreso than younger people. There was a time not long ago when every piece of information was not immediately accessible in my pocket. My grandparents had an actual encyclopedia set that was treasured along with their 100s of issues of National Geographic.
Of course not everything is rainbows and butterflies today, but the world as a whole is better than what it was. People have access to opportunities that were never thought possible before. Pretty amazing really.
Every book or tool you could get your hands on was a treasure; and my friends and I, developing primitive adventure games, had to reinvent some wheels in pretty lame ways, like image compression for our backgrounds, or drawing of sprites onto a background.
I once got my hands on a 8086 assembly manual, what a gem that was! but alas, we had no assembler or a C compiler, so we reverted to creating blank files and using DOS' DEBUG.EXE to tweak the assembly from all zeros to whatever we wanted.
It was really exciting although not very "productive". Then one of the guys got a modem and the BBS world opened up to us, and it was never the same again.