When I started learning programming it was book (often terribly shitty ones, full of mistakes and non-working listings) and hear-and-say.
I started at 11 years old or so. I didn't yet have a modem (not before I was 16 or so).
So it was trial and error and trying to figure things out. I remember printing a huge assembly program on a dot-matrix printer and going to a friend's place with the listing, explaining him that the routine would work for a few seconds then crash. Then he read the stuff and after a while he found the error : I was using 'jsr' instead of 'jmp', leading to an eventual stack blow.
And there were also "scene disks" or "news disk" from the scene or whatever they were called that we would copy from our friends. I remember one from some scandinavian group (I was in France), in english, where they were explaining various sorting algorithms and where/when we should use them in intros / demos (before cracked games).
It was all a "black art" because these stuff (learning assembly to code intros / demos / cracktros [but they weren't called cracktros yet IIRC]) weren't in books, nor in magazines.
Then came my first modem (9600 bauds) and pirate BBSes (and writing intros for these BBSes) and suddenly a whole world of knowledge opened to us. It was magic.
Then came my first Internet ISP. Long before Google and no need for Google : old search engine were sufficient to find gems (Like Fravia's tools of the trade tutorials to learn how to pirate games on the PC, very convenient when you just arrived from the C64 / Amiga scene).
And of course there was Usenet. Usenet and a good kill files was immensely more useful than StackOverflow. Heck, the amount of knowledge on Usenet still probably dwarfs SO today.
I'd say DejaNews (later bought by Google and more or less became part of Google Groups) was the most important search engine of them all when it came to code. A good Usenet reader was useful to stay up to date and to ask/answer question while DejaNews contained all Usenet's archive (and a search engine).
I started at 11 years old or so. I didn't yet have a modem (not before I was 16 or so).
So it was trial and error and trying to figure things out. I remember printing a huge assembly program on a dot-matrix printer and going to a friend's place with the listing, explaining him that the routine would work for a few seconds then crash. Then he read the stuff and after a while he found the error : I was using 'jsr' instead of 'jmp', leading to an eventual stack blow.
And there were also "scene disks" or "news disk" from the scene or whatever they were called that we would copy from our friends. I remember one from some scandinavian group (I was in France), in english, where they were explaining various sorting algorithms and where/when we should use them in intros / demos (before cracked games).
It was all a "black art" because these stuff (learning assembly to code intros / demos / cracktros [but they weren't called cracktros yet IIRC]) weren't in books, nor in magazines.
Then came my first modem (9600 bauds) and pirate BBSes (and writing intros for these BBSes) and suddenly a whole world of knowledge opened to us. It was magic.
Then came my first Internet ISP. Long before Google and no need for Google : old search engine were sufficient to find gems (Like Fravia's tools of the trade tutorials to learn how to pirate games on the PC, very convenient when you just arrived from the C64 / Amiga scene).
And of course there was Usenet. Usenet and a good kill files was immensely more useful than StackOverflow. Heck, the amount of knowledge on Usenet still probably dwarfs SO today.
I'd say DejaNews (later bought by Google and more or less became part of Google Groups) was the most important search engine of them all when it came to code. A good Usenet reader was useful to stay up to date and to ask/answer question while DejaNews contained all Usenet's archive (and a search engine).
That's what I remember, more or less... : )