how did people even learn to code when there was no docs, no YouTube... nothing?

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@codevsdev There was this alien land where every question was answered with sarcasm and hate. We called it StackOverflow. You could be a beginner, a dev, an expert - it did not matter. Your question would be downvoted and draw the eye of sauron who would shit on you for days.

@codevsdev how did people figure out how to code before electricity?

@codevsdev The ancestors had an ancient method. When someone came up with new ideas they could use it to record information so other people could learn from it later, even after they themselves had died. I remember the old ones talking about it when I was small, they called it “book”.

@codevsdev Books...we read🙋‍♀️

@codevsdev The basement of Stacy's bookstore in San Fransisco on Market Street had everything us pioneer "coders" needed. We did not call our selves coders. We were developers who mostly taught ourselves how to code. I hear it is closing down this year. 😣

@codevsdev We modified other people’s code!

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@codevsdev No docs, he says.

@codevsdev When you bought a compiler for a language it came with physical books and a huge library of examples, sometimes even on disk/CD/DVD. Before that there were magazines with code you could type in.... though they normally followed in the next issue by corrections for the typos!

@codevsdev Back in the day, a lot of people would try and just quit out of frustration. At the time, they figured that they either had a gift for it or not. If most of them tried again today with all of the available resources, they would probably not have quit.

@codevsdev Time, they where given more time, patience and respect. You read the man, you try to run cmd, you fail, you try again, you make update notes, you try again, you succeed and then you do it 100+ times in a week. Boom next item, you have a datacenter in your head.

@codevsdev Reading 'Let us c' and Shaum's - during boring college lectures

@codevsdev some of the best memories i have is from scavenging local book stores trying to figure out how the hell protected mode worked. Then one day .. i found a DOS system manual, it had LDT and GDT bit structures in it.. never been so happy :D </nerd>

@codevsdev Back in the day, I taught myself how to write in HTML and made websites for people I knew. If you know how to read you can teach yourself how to do anything.

@codevsdev Books like 21 days to C++.

@codevsdev Used this in high school to get started a.co/d/0ictB4P0

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@codevsdev There were always docs. Some computers even came with a BASIC manual. Magazines had code samples and we had to copy them line by line.

@codevsdev We had these things called books They were made of paper The docs were printed on those pages of paper

I remember being taught Logo (Turtle) at school when I was 7. It was in the year 1999. That was the first time I had ever heard the term programming. And 6 years later, we were taught C at school and were prescribed a book. So yeah, it was school/college classes combined with books till EdTech took off.

@codevsdev Things called B-O-O-K-S. They’re made of this thing called P-A-P-E-R.

@codevsdev Surprise, there was always docs. ... books, text documents, manuals shipped with hardware and software, internet forums, bbs systems, usenet, IRC... etc. and of course lets not forget "taking things apart" ...

@codevsdev 1. You tried things and used your brain to think. 2. You talked to others. 3. Books.

@codevsdev How I spent my senior year of high school:

@codevsdev I started with a spiral bound book for BASIC. It's all clocks man. Gears on gears. Once you understand loops and iteration, the rest is jazz.

@codevsdev we were literate. these were always the largest damn books in the bookstore.

@codevsdev We figured it out. Wrote my first line of code in FORTRAN IV in 1971 to run on an IBM 360 mainframe.

Seriously? There were 1000s of pages on operating systems, assembler instructions, I/O, etc., and for higher level languages, peripheral control, interface protocols, databases - everything - there have ALWAYS been books. These two were hugely popular in the 80s (but there were dozens of not hundreds other very popular ones and hundreds of them on more specialized material)

@codevsdev Books, many many books. Way back then, the technologies and programming languages hardly ever changed.

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@codevsdev By reading books, attending class and cooperate with fellows alike. Obviously it worked.

@codevsdev Trial and error, patience, talking with friends and if you were very lucky good book or two.