Before StackOverflow? Not too bad. Without internet access, though? Much, much harder, or rather, slower - a similar level of information could be obtained but it took phone calls, bus trips to a reference library, etc. Other than that, you just had to figure everything out yourself from the user manuals and experimentation.
Of course, back then computers were much simpler and user manuals were much more complete and lower level, so this still feasible, where it wouldn't be today.
Google was a major step up, even when it had less than a billion pages indexed. I remember trying to find programming information on Alta Vista. It was possible but there was a lot of clicking "next page".
What we did here in Poland (Internet became available to the public in 1996 and then expensive) was to check the library and book shops then buy the worthwhile books. And as usual, run through all examples and then modify and extend them for fun and experiment.
The books were of vastly different quality, the food ones always had properly described algorithms in algol or pseudocode of the day.
The RAD ones had plenty of screenshots.
Also the books came with disks containing the described programs.
It was typically some form of BASIC or Pascal.
Advanced Turbo Pascal books had x86 assembly in them. Old advanced C64 BASIC books had 6052 assembly. And sometimes you could get your hands on an Amiga Rexx book or magazine.
From the more advanced books you really learned how dumb the computers are and how they work internally. This is missing nowadays.
There were also pretty decent magazines with ideas and program printouts.
You had to experiment more and rely on the cookbook less.
I disagree computers were much simpler. If you wanted to play games, you had to struggle with IRQ, DMA, extended memory mode, smartdrive, config.sys, autoexec.bat, commandline ARJ, zip, rar, floppies or tapes, and so on. If you had Linux, you also had to regularly recompile kernel to make something work (for example a device driver).
My pet hypothesis is that puzzle and turn-based strategy games were much more popular back then because average computer user was much nerdier. Age of Wonders III came out in recent years, and while it has very good production qualities and is a much more advanced strategy than Heroes of Might and Magic or first Civilization games, it never reached its popularity.
But back to programming. Monthly magazines were BIG before internet, and some of them taught programming. For example there would be a game or another interactive program written in BASIC in every issue. When you had the entire source code printed in front of you, it was fairly easy to tinker with it to grant extra lives, etc.
Computer interfaces were lower level, and less friendly. Computers themselves are now mindbogglingly more complex than they were back then (and a good deal of that complexity goes towards making them easier to build and use!)
I agree with your hypothesis about games. If you have to do some study and learn some magic incantations even to launch a game (insert fond memories of himem.sys and boot disks here), then it stands to reason that those of us who could actually get into games were the type of people who liked a bit of an intellectual challenge.
Magazines were a big thing, definitely. I have a big box of Acorn Users somewhere that I inherited from my dad, and at long intervals I pull them out to read through the articles and old BASIC listings. :)
+1 for the magazine mention. A lot of what I learned from tinkering with computers back then came from magazine and the floppies (and later CDs) of shareware they tended to include.
A book open on the desk, another one open on my lap. I spent a lot more time reading programming books cover to cover than I do now, and I spent a lot of time in the programming bookstores that no longer exist, like SoftPro. In fact SoftPro was sort of like dessert when I went out for lunch.
I think that is what it is meant to be. Mostly an exchange of opinions and discussions. Stackoverflow happens to be much more formal and precise. So, while a question like "How do I use RxJava primitives with Spring MVC" is better suited for StackOverflow, a question like "Do you believe reactive programming is highly misplaced in most situations" is more quora-ish... or at least that's the way I think of them.
Everytime someone asks what you'd think would be a simple yes or no question, the top answer is a 600-word story about something their mother did on a hippie commune in the 80's, or something. It's bloody irritating, yet I keep on reading. What can I say, it's something to read when you're in a waiting room.
Newsgroups and mailing lists were the thing. To me as a kid, the space felt much cozier and more intimidating.
But the technology has evolved in more ways than just stack exchange. There was the availability of compilers in general- today, it's a search and a 1 minute download to get your compiler. And pick your quirky tutorial of choice. Back in the day as a kid, it was mowing lawns and paying for boxes of disks, paying for thick books(hope you bought the right $40 book!), nobody to verbally speak with, and staring at obtuse example code for hours late night while you were supposed to be sleeping.
There was also a work-alike to StackOverflow in my pre-internet days for Turbo Pascal called 'SWAG'. It had example code snippets for all kinds of questions/problems, sorted by category.
I was surprised to find that someone made a web version out of it:
Good books were /great/. Local library had some books on Basic, VB (with a Visual Basic 5 CCE), C++ and whatnot. They may not contain the most recent 'best practices' or may even teach some antipatterns, but they get the ol' noggin' rolling and tuned for coding.
A well structured book with bite-sized chapters should be very approachable even for today's attention deficit generations.
Before StackOverflow you could still find your information on forums and newsgroups.
Before the Internet took off it was a much different situation. You'd read many books of course, and to fill in the missing gaps you could read magazines or talk to other people at conferences. IT conferences in those days did make much more sense than they do now, imo.
There was a time before forums and newsgroups when all you had was magazines.
For many Dr. Dobb's (http://www.drdobbs.com) was the only real source of programming information they had. Those with more of an academic background had access to the books by Knuth and others, but those were hard to come by in those days. Bookstores didn't carry them, libraries didn't have them, and Amazon didn't exist so you couldn't buy them special-order even if you wanted to.
I learned C from a book and open-source software I could hack away on that was also written in C. I learned C++ from the Borland manuals that came with their compiler. I learned Perl from of the first O'Reilly books ever made. Newsgroups were only so useful, you'd have trouble getting answers to basic questions in a timely manner. Most were more interested in more high-level discussions like how to evolve the language.
If you wanted mentoring you could take your chances on IRC. Most of the time you'd have to endure an unofficial hazing ritual where they'd ignore you, then ridicule you, then finally, if you hadn't run off in disgust, begrudgingly answer some of your questions. Getting a straight answer to a basic problem was pretty much a social engineering problem.
It was only in the late 1990s that programming-specific sites like Perl Monks (http://perlmonks.org) popped up and filled that niche. That was the precursor to sites like Stack Overflow. I'm extremely glad to have been a part of that community where even the dumbest question would be given a straight-forward, non-judgemental answer, in some cases by the guy who literally wrote the book on Perl.
For me, shit. I was in rural Australia. What I had to do was pour over the documentation and experiment a lot.
Now this was back when is as 9 and using Qbasic though.
I was able to write a bunch of questions to ask the senior teachers at high school, but that only led to more questions.
I did eventually get given c++ by a friend, but I was absolutely stuck.
Admittedly though, the lack of books was the sticking point. I believe if I had a few more text books, that it would have been a hell of a lot easier. Not as easy as im-stick-quickly-google as I do now, but a ton easier.
Hmm after typing this out I realise it doesn't really answer your question, bit I'll post it anyway.
But imho learning from. Textbook with no outside resources (which I did later in life), made me come up with some interesting work around a, which later on gave me insights, but to get software out quickly, SO and Google help a lot.
Not very clear I know, sorry but that's my 2 cents.
Books would provide the general guidelines on how to do some stuff. I used a search engine (not sure if google at that time) to decipher the exceptions and it eventually would point me to some random message board. It taught me to RTFM.
There was this horrible site called experts-exchange.com (note the hyphen) that dominated search results, but IIRC they made you pay to see the answers.
IIRC: _can_, not _could_. They only started doing that when Google started punishing them in their search results for not showing others what they showed Google's robots.
Also from the same era was implausibly popular 'dynamic HTML' site Dynamic Drive, where users could copypaste semi-curated JS, which was responsible for some of the worst code ever to be deployed on the internet.
I honestly don't know if it helped move web development forwards or held it back!
Absolutely! That and being able to run code directly in the context of the page through the dev tools console.
Even these days if i'm having a poke around somebody else's work, one of the first things i do is to pop open the dev tools and start seeing which libraries they're running and what their custom namespaces are.
I started with Hypercard and followed up with Borland C++ Builder. In both cases, there was a reference manual and many examples. SDKs (such as the DirectX one) also came with tutorials and sample code. I also bought a book about C++, but it was a very bad one in retrospect, as well as the OpenGL red book.
Not having access to the internet (let alone Stack Overflow) really forced you into a mindset where you were on your own, so you had to take a scientific approach to finding bugs: trying hypotheses, comparing code that worked and code that didn't, reverting changes to a known working state, and so on. I wish it had made me better at writing easily debuggable code, but I was still too young back then, so it mostly made me very good at debugging ugly code (this, and my four-year stint as a programming TA means that my most effective debugging method is staring very hard at code for a minute).
After a while, I managed to get a connection to the internet. I suddenly gained access to a lot more tutorials and online resources. I spent a little while on IRC and on the Gamedev.net forums, but by then it was a lot faster for me to solve my own problems than to post them somewhere and wait for an answer. What I needed then was to unlearn all the bad habits that came from coding on my own, and it took a while (and a few team projects). I was this kind of weird creature who knew the C++ standard by heart and could find subtle errors just by reading C++ code, but who was completely unable to work in a team where everyone wasn't a C++ language lawyer. I got better.
Borland C++ came with 5 thick books as a reference. It was great. Powerbasic came with a big book, part tutorial, part reference. Schneider CPC had a big programming book with it. So it wasn't bad at all! When you extended your programs with stuff like mouse-support advanced graphics, you read through the readme.txt that was delivered with the library (the libraries could be bought, were freeware, came from your friend or were delivered on magazine-disktettes). Of course, getting help when unexpected problems popped up, was much more difficult without the internet. But then again, you were usually not mangling with a bunch of languages like (HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, Typescript, Angular, React......) but were rather stuck with one programming language that you used for everything. Basic, Turbo Pascal, C, C++... you used one of them for many years as the average guy. So after some time, you got a feeling for it and could work around problems.
I literally begged my mom to buy a couple of books for me. The Debian sysadmin bible and some mixed programming for linux book that featured bits from many languages like bash, perl, tcl.
We could just barely afford computers for myself so I am eternally grateful to my mom for working nights while I seemingly played around with Linux and scripting in my room.
The next worst is when there are only a handful of search results and the top one is a forum post with replies saying the answer is easily available, and the OP should have used Google first.
The remaining results being archives of that first one.
No, the worst is when someone posts their bug and then others start asking questions or trying to figure it out, then the original poster says "thanks guys, I was actually able to figure it out". And doesn't post the solution!!! Just so infuriating.
I actually have quite fond memories of the documentation that came with Sun workstations around '90 - a huge amount of documentation and boxes of ring binders to put them in. Later on you even got a complete set of PostScript books for NeWS.
I learned a lot of lower level Unix programming from those Sun documents.
I was extremely lucky and stumbled across a particular IRC channel where some kind souls took pity on me and patiently answered my questions and gave me advice. I think it's fairly likely I wouldn't be a professional programmer today if I hadn't found that channel / those people.
For me at least, there was a certain level of aptitude I needed before I was able to productively seek out knowledge on my own. The range of possible things-to-learn in the programming world is so vast and daunting that I needed some hand-holding at the outset, until I had enough knowledge to reasonably separate things I needed/wanted to learn about from things I could confidently disregard.
If I were learning from scratch today, I think it's fairly likely I would still need something similar, even with the existence of SO.
Similar for me. When I had near zero programming experience I picked out a boutique PHP CMS to build a relatively fancy blog. The CMS author was up on IRC for hours helping me shoehorn my rediculous project into his CMS and patiently explaining some very basic programming concepts to me.
This really brings back memories. During my first year of programming there were occasions when I was absolutely desperate for help. A friend introduced me to some programming channels on IRC, and I was amazed at how knowledgeable and helpful those guys were.
Stackoverflow definitely saves a lot of time, but it doesn't compare to the personalized help from those gurus on IRC. Unfortunately, much harder to find these days.
All these stories are reminding me of m first encounter with programming. My Grandpa gave me his $600 Visual Basic (5?) book + software when I was 13 (~15 years ago). He didn't have the registration key, but I naively thought I could get lucky with a 16+ digit code. The first code I tried failed, but I tried changing the last digit and after a couple of tries got it. I didn't know what it was called at the time, but I instinctively guessed it could be a checksum, and somehow, that's how Microsoft protected their $600 product in 2002. Anyway, my Grandpa passed before I went to college but I think we would have had a lot of fun talking programming, because I was much more interested in pure math in HS when he died. That first programming book was definitely what got me interested though.
i just worked through books (you know the ones with animals on them) and online courses like in school. i don't think stackoverflow is a great place to learn programming, it's only good for looking up specifics.
I was visiting a local library 2-3 times a week and took out books like "The C Language" and SICP and slowly worked my way through them. It involved a lot of tinkering plus trial and error. Learning to program was less spoon-fed compared to today's norm and needed more dedication since gathering information and its synthesis took longer and was harder.
I learnt back in the BBC Micro era, when I could get books out of the local library. What I didn't have at that time was a computer - my very first programming had to be done on paper until I could get time on the computers at school.
Later I got a Spectrum; later still a PC. It was vital that these came with BASIC. Paying for development tools would not have happened. Eventually I acquired pirated copies of Turbo Pascal, Microsoft QuickC, and finally a legitimate but already obsolete copy of Borland Turbo C on seven 5.25" floppy disks.
Eventually I also got a modem and could gain access to such troves as the PC Game Programmer's Encyclopedia.
I think the main difference is that if you came up with a question you had to answer it yourself through research or experimentation. If you weren't very persistent, or weren't given the free time to do the necessary self-directed learning, you wouldn't get very far.
Modern knowledge is streamed to you in small fragments. Back then it came in lumps. Multiple-inch-thick lumps. Most of the books were pretty worthless, although the Peter Norton ones I really learnt stuff from.
It was also viable to set out to read the documentation you had cover-to-cover and go looking for interesting or useful things. These days there's almost too much, and it's certainly not linearly structured.
Similar story here. Although the only way I could get my hands on the school computers was intentionally swearing at the dinner ladies and being sent inside to sit in "the boring computer room" because the school had a strict policy of anti-technology in all subjects. They never worked my tactic out and thought I was just disruptive.
My knowledge came mostly from the BBC Micro Users guide and Advanced Users Guide initially. Eventually a dead relative, who I will be eternally grateful for their thought, left me a not insignificant amount of cash and I bought a then new BBC Master!
This eventually made way for a PC and eventually in the mid 1990s, Linux and then I discovered my father had a 1st edition copy of "Programming C" stashed away in a junk box somewhere. Oh and O'Reilly books. I had crates of them at one point.
To actually learn C (not ++) I used Bjarne Stroustrup's C all the way. I think it was 150 pages of book with 10 pages of index, not exactly a heavy book, probably no larger than a 13" screen 'ultrabook' and I took it everywhere.
Back then we had attention spans longer than a goldfish, so studying a book that was so concise was the way to go, not to skim search results, copy and paste.
Before then with the BBC Micro again there were just the two manuals, the one it came with and some advanced one. The ZX81 was okay with just the manual it came with.
Computer magazines were actually how you learned new stuff, or at least saw stuff that you wanted to do, even if the reality was typing in hex-dumps.
A Microsoft study in 2013 said the attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds, whereas we had attention spans of 12 seconds in 2000 and 8 seconds in 2013.
There is a lot of 'averages' here, however, we have changed how we expect to learn things. I have no idea whether it is 'needle, haystack' or the other way around for commands I use daily. We just remember where to find stuff on the internets rather than in our own grey matter.
Similar story with an additional twist. In mid 80's, I was 12 years old. At that age the problem was to realize that documentation existed. I had only access to libraries and a few bookshop. There were very few magazines etc. But to have the real knowledge, I had to understand that my books had to be in english, coming from other countries. At my age, that was somehow hard to realize. Knowledge was there but not easily reachable and, in any case, very expensive. My dad helped me a bit but even at 12 y.o. I was further than him so he couldn't help me efficiently (and well, at that time, 12 year old asking to code in assembly language was, well, so unexpected that he may not have known how to help :-))
But those were the days. We had to experiment like hell (any of you tried to understand the RWTS routines to read/write on Apple2 floppies ? :-)
I spent a lot of time on local fidonet echoes to read and discuss programming topics. Books in .txt also happened from time to time on university BBS's. That was fun, but the early internet wasn't too bad too.
289 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadOf course, back then computers were much simpler and user manuals were much more complete and lower level, so this still feasible, where it wouldn't be today.
The books were of vastly different quality, the food ones always had properly described algorithms in algol or pseudocode of the day. The RAD ones had plenty of screenshots. Also the books came with disks containing the described programs. It was typically some form of BASIC or Pascal.
Advanced Turbo Pascal books had x86 assembly in them. Old advanced C64 BASIC books had 6052 assembly. And sometimes you could get your hands on an Amiga Rexx book or magazine.
From the more advanced books you really learned how dumb the computers are and how they work internally. This is missing nowadays.
There were also pretty decent magazines with ideas and program printouts.
You had to experiment more and rely on the cookbook less.
My pet hypothesis is that puzzle and turn-based strategy games were much more popular back then because average computer user was much nerdier. Age of Wonders III came out in recent years, and while it has very good production qualities and is a much more advanced strategy than Heroes of Might and Magic or first Civilization games, it never reached its popularity.
But back to programming. Monthly magazines were BIG before internet, and some of them taught programming. For example there would be a game or another interactive program written in BASIC in every issue. When you had the entire source code printed in front of you, it was fairly easy to tinker with it to grant extra lives, etc.
I agree with your hypothesis about games. If you have to do some study and learn some magic incantations even to launch a game (insert fond memories of himem.sys and boot disks here), then it stands to reason that those of us who could actually get into games were the type of people who liked a bit of an intellectual challenge.
Magazines were a big thing, definitely. I have a big box of Acorn Users somewhere that I inherited from my dad, and at long intervals I pull them out to read through the articles and old BASIC listings. :)
The abbreviated answer, for me:
A book open on the desk, another one open on my lap. I spent a lot more time reading programming books cover to cover than I do now, and I spent a lot of time in the programming bookstores that no longer exist, like SoftPro. In fact SoftPro was sort of like dessert when I went out for lunch.
But the technology has evolved in more ways than just stack exchange. There was the availability of compilers in general- today, it's a search and a 1 minute download to get your compiler. And pick your quirky tutorial of choice. Back in the day as a kid, it was mowing lawns and paying for boxes of disks, paying for thick books(hope you bought the right $40 book!), nobody to verbally speak with, and staring at obtuse example code for hours late night while you were supposed to be sleeping.
Good times.
I was surprised to find that someone made a web version out of it:
http://swag.delphidabbler.com
A well structured book with bite-sized chapters should be very approachable even for today's attention deficit generations.
Before the Internet took off it was a much different situation. You'd read many books of course, and to fill in the missing gaps you could read magazines or talk to other people at conferences. IT conferences in those days did make much more sense than they do now, imo.
For many Dr. Dobb's (http://www.drdobbs.com) was the only real source of programming information they had. Those with more of an academic background had access to the books by Knuth and others, but those were hard to come by in those days. Bookstores didn't carry them, libraries didn't have them, and Amazon didn't exist so you couldn't buy them special-order even if you wanted to.
I learned C from a book and open-source software I could hack away on that was also written in C. I learned C++ from the Borland manuals that came with their compiler. I learned Perl from of the first O'Reilly books ever made. Newsgroups were only so useful, you'd have trouble getting answers to basic questions in a timely manner. Most were more interested in more high-level discussions like how to evolve the language.
If you wanted mentoring you could take your chances on IRC. Most of the time you'd have to endure an unofficial hazing ritual where they'd ignore you, then ridicule you, then finally, if you hadn't run off in disgust, begrudgingly answer some of your questions. Getting a straight answer to a basic problem was pretty much a social engineering problem.
It was only in the late 1990s that programming-specific sites like Perl Monks (http://perlmonks.org) popped up and filled that niche. That was the precursor to sites like Stack Overflow. I'm extremely glad to have been a part of that community where even the dumbest question would be given a straight-forward, non-judgemental answer, in some cases by the guy who literally wrote the book on Perl.
Now this was back when is as 9 and using Qbasic though.
I was able to write a bunch of questions to ask the senior teachers at high school, but that only led to more questions.
I did eventually get given c++ by a friend, but I was absolutely stuck.
Admittedly though, the lack of books was the sticking point. I believe if I had a few more text books, that it would have been a hell of a lot easier. Not as easy as im-stick-quickly-google as I do now, but a ton easier.
Hmm after typing this out I realise it doesn't really answer your question, bit I'll post it anyway.
But imho learning from. Textbook with no outside resources (which I did later in life), made me come up with some interesting work around a, which later on gave me insights, but to get software out quickly, SO and Google help a lot.
Not very clear I know, sorry but that's my 2 cents.
I honestly don't know if it helped move web development forwards or held it back!
Even these days if i'm having a poke around somebody else's work, one of the first things i do is to pop open the dev tools and start seeing which libraries they're running and what their custom namespaces are.
Not having access to the internet (let alone Stack Overflow) really forced you into a mindset where you were on your own, so you had to take a scientific approach to finding bugs: trying hypotheses, comparing code that worked and code that didn't, reverting changes to a known working state, and so on. I wish it had made me better at writing easily debuggable code, but I was still too young back then, so it mostly made me very good at debugging ugly code (this, and my four-year stint as a programming TA means that my most effective debugging method is staring very hard at code for a minute).
After a while, I managed to get a connection to the internet. I suddenly gained access to a lot more tutorials and online resources. I spent a little while on IRC and on the Gamedev.net forums, but by then it was a lot faster for me to solve my own problems than to post them somewhere and wait for an answer. What I needed then was to unlearn all the bad habits that came from coding on my own, and it took a while (and a few team projects). I was this kind of weird creature who knew the C++ standard by heart and could find subtle errors just by reading C++ code, but who was completely unable to work in a team where everyone wasn't a C++ language lawyer. I got better.
We could just barely afford computers for myself so I am eternally grateful to my mom for working nights while I seemingly played around with Linux and scripting in my room.
The remaining results being archives of that first one.
I learned a lot of lower level Unix programming from those Sun documents.
For me at least, there was a certain level of aptitude I needed before I was able to productively seek out knowledge on my own. The range of possible things-to-learn in the programming world is so vast and daunting that I needed some hand-holding at the outset, until I had enough knowledge to reasonably separate things I needed/wanted to learn about from things I could confidently disregard.
If I were learning from scratch today, I think it's fairly likely I would still need something similar, even with the existence of SO.
Alex Suraci If you're reading this, thank you.
Stackoverflow definitely saves a lot of time, but it doesn't compare to the personalized help from those gurus on IRC. Unfortunately, much harder to find these days.
For a while I had a Win95 product key memorised, for the frequent reinstalls that were a feature of pre-7 Windows.
Later I got a Spectrum; later still a PC. It was vital that these came with BASIC. Paying for development tools would not have happened. Eventually I acquired pirated copies of Turbo Pascal, Microsoft QuickC, and finally a legitimate but already obsolete copy of Borland Turbo C on seven 5.25" floppy disks.
Eventually I also got a modem and could gain access to such troves as the PC Game Programmer's Encyclopedia.
I think the main difference is that if you came up with a question you had to answer it yourself through research or experimentation. If you weren't very persistent, or weren't given the free time to do the necessary self-directed learning, you wouldn't get very far.
Modern knowledge is streamed to you in small fragments. Back then it came in lumps. Multiple-inch-thick lumps. Most of the books were pretty worthless, although the Peter Norton ones I really learnt stuff from.
It was also viable to set out to read the documentation you had cover-to-cover and go looking for interesting or useful things. These days there's almost too much, and it's certainly not linearly structured.
My knowledge came mostly from the BBC Micro Users guide and Advanced Users Guide initially. Eventually a dead relative, who I will be eternally grateful for their thought, left me a not insignificant amount of cash and I bought a then new BBC Master!
The books in question:
http://bbc.nvg.org/doc/BBCUserGuide-1.00.pdf
http://stardot.org.uk/mirrors/www.bbcdocs.com/filebase/essen...
This eventually made way for a PC and eventually in the mid 1990s, Linux and then I discovered my father had a 1st edition copy of "Programming C" stashed away in a junk box somewhere. Oh and O'Reilly books. I had crates of them at one point.
To actually learn C (not ++) I used Bjarne Stroustrup's C all the way. I think it was 150 pages of book with 10 pages of index, not exactly a heavy book, probably no larger than a 13" screen 'ultrabook' and I took it everywhere.
Back then we had attention spans longer than a goldfish, so studying a book that was so concise was the way to go, not to skim search results, copy and paste.
Before then with the BBC Micro again there were just the two manuals, the one it came with and some advanced one. The ZX81 was okay with just the manual it came with.
Computer magazines were actually how you learned new stuff, or at least saw stuff that you wanted to do, even if the reality was typing in hex-dumps.
As for attention spans:
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/07/25/another-modern...
A Microsoft study in 2013 said the attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds, whereas we had attention spans of 12 seconds in 2000 and 8 seconds in 2013.
There is a lot of 'averages' here, however, we have changed how we expect to learn things. I have no idea whether it is 'needle, haystack' or the other way around for commands I use daily. We just remember where to find stuff on the internets rather than in our own grey matter.
But those were the days. We had to experiment like hell (any of you tried to understand the RWTS routines to read/write on Apple2 floppies ? :-)