Ask HN: How did programmers solve problems before Stack Overflow existed?

You could either ask your coworkers or you would look through encyclopedia sized books with api documentation.

For me, IRC, message boards, etc. I also think reading documentation is something that one needs to learn, and often answers a lot of questions. Even before Stack Overflow existed, I saw many ignore the documentation that was often right in front of them.

Various magazines (Dr. Dobbs, MSJ/MSDN Magazine), USENET (comp.lang.*), email lists, MSDN subscriptions (the DVDs full of Microsoft documentation), books, lots of experimentation, etc.

There were actually quite a few resources before StackOverflow.

Plus, software was generally better working :)

You collected books on the programming language or system APIs, or a textbook on algorithms, and sometimes saved magazines, plus a bit of experimentation.

Fidonet and Usenet were good places to ask.

Looking at the source code of open source projects, especially when some piece of the code was doing something that you wanted to figure out.

Lots of trial and error for us web developers before Firebug and Chrome Dev Tools.

I’ve lost weeks of my life fighting bugs in IE 6.

For a lot of internal code in large companies, stack overflow does not help.

Tribal knowledge and becoming a ninja at debugging and reverse engineering ancient code seems to do the trick.

Very very slowly

You solved problems yourself.

Truly, a dark time compared to the more enlightened "cut and paste from some website solves all problems" utopia we now live in.