Just wondering. Are there any pre-google devs in here to paint a picture how you did your job?

@h3ll i thought that was a username but it wasnt. Then i googled what altavista was. Poor altavista :(

@ctrlz 😂😂

Books, user groups, the Well CompuServe, AOL, mail lists...

Well, books where very important back then. I always had a reference book of the language I was coding in right next to me, just so that you could "google" the syntax of a specific function :-)

So yeah, we made it happen anyway somehow, but of course the programs where a lot smaller back then...no web, no web services, no TFS or GIT or SourceSafe...backup by printing your code basically :-)

As a sidenote I just want to say that I borrowed my first programming book at the local library, and wrote my first program on a typewriter and put it in a binder...I never ran any of thoose programs, since I didn't have a computer back then :-)

And I just want to make it clear, that I am not 80 years old, only 46 :-)

@Hultan70 haha brilliant :) backup by printing code. So in case of server burning you can always ctrl+c ctrl+v from the paper. No wait 😅

Books. So. Many. Books.

Books and photocopied cheat sheets handed out to the whole team. A really big pile of old source from previous employers at home.

Like today, most of your actual job was spent in meetings and explaining things to other people slowly so it's not really that different.

I used to code in Sybase PowerBuilder, which uses a proprietary language called Powerscript; this was before the big explosion of Google.

Man. Did I read and read and read that goddamn reference guide. F1, F1, F1, and HOPE it was in there.

this might be a good wk30 subject. @dfox

@Hultan70 Bravo!!

I remember going to the library and copying snippets of code by hand in my notebook from ancient C "tomes".

@Hultan70 Same here, much time spent in the public library checking out books on programming. I soon hooked up with a group of other youth who knew more than I. I would pick their brains and then go home and recreate anything I saw them do.

Yup, all of my programs were printed using a dot matrix printer.

By the way, I'm 41.

Mail lists, books and either altavista or excite

Sams Teach Yourself series

MSDN on three CD or DVD I can't recall. And you have more time to complete the task... So you could check many solutions and find the best. And you were the best programmer in all known wold. 😁

Senior developers, their tutoring and their code. Manuals and Reference documents and the lovely nice concept index in the back pages. You needed to know what you were looking for. I think it made me better at Googling later.