It wasn't as bad as it sounds; there were mailing lists and usenet groups. Before that, software development was much simpler and much closer to the metal. If I didn't understand how some system call worked I'd just drop into the low-level debugger and step through it to see what it did. You can reasonably expect to understand how your whole OS works when the whole thing is only a few megabytes of machine code.
You're right, though, I used to buy volumes of Inside Macintosh and read them, cover to cover, over a cup of tea. I learned C++ from a book, too. I actually miss that style of learning; I like to understand my tools comprehensively, and not to just skim whatever I need from the reference and leave the rest as a mystery. I know that there are lots of programmers who spend their whole careers glomming together bits of other people's libraries, but that just doesn't appeal to me.
It was basically impossible to get any information about CS fundamentals before I got access to the WWW. I guess people in universities must have had access to textbooks, but as a working professional I didn't know enough about what I didn't know to even know there was something to look for, much less have anywhere I could try to find it.
> I actually miss that style of learning; I like to understand my tools comprehensively, and not to just skim whatever I need from the reference and leave the rest as a mystery. I know that there are lots of programmers who spend their whole careers glomming together bits of other people's libraries, but that just doesn't appeal to me.
I think you're presenting a false dichotomy, and expressing inappropriate disdain for people with different learning styles from your own. For one thing, you can gain a deep understanding by using a library, language etc. in a nonlinear fashion. For my part, reading a book about programming from front to back 5 times and working the examples will leave me with long-term retention of somewhere in the neighborhood of 0%. Actually using the language and libraries and digging deeper as I need to gives me a far stronger grasp. I don't know everything there is to know about every feature of Core Graphics under OS X, for example, but three years since I last touched it, I could easily ramble for hours about all manner of crufty real world knowledge that I gleaned from using it.
You're right, though, I used to buy volumes of Inside Macintosh and read them, cover to cover, over a cup of tea. I learned C++ from a book, too. I actually miss that style of learning; I like to understand my tools comprehensively, and not to just skim whatever I need from the reference and leave the rest as a mystery. I know that there are lots of programmers who spend their whole careers glomming together bits of other people's libraries, but that just doesn't appeal to me.
It was basically impossible to get any information about CS fundamentals before I got access to the WWW. I guess people in universities must have had access to textbooks, but as a working professional I didn't know enough about what I didn't know to even know there was something to look for, much less have anywhere I could try to find it.