No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s
I remember a time before Stack Overflow or autocomplete, when coding in the 80s meant relying entirely on memory and physical manuals. Every syntax error required hours of manual debugging without modern search engines. That era demanded deep focus and true understanding, as there were no quick fixes or AI assistants to guide the way.
We didn't have Google to save us; we had to become the documentation ourselves.
- rpdillon
Yeah, I'll never forget pirating Turbo Pascal off of AOL in the 90s, going to my local library and taking out a book about Turbo Pascal so I could learn what I could do with it. Ended up coding a program that embedded metadata for all of Rush's songs, their titles, and how long they were, so that you could plan out a mixtape of just Rush's songs. Even allowed you to specify what kind of tape you had, so you could adjust each side, whether it was 45 minutes or 30 minutes, things like that. It was called Rush Mixtape Creator, and I shared the compiled binary on Usenet. Got emails about it as long as six years later asking me to make changes and update it. It was the first actual program I ever distributed. 1995.
Coding was different back then.
- karmakaze
The thing that I really liked was that you felt like you were programming for the hardware and not really for an OS. Most systems ran a single program at a time so you pretty much had full control except for interrupts. On DOS TSR (terminate, stay resident) interrupt handlers could also do amazing things.
Knowing a lot about my personal computer (Atari 400 and later Atari ST) made it so easy to do work on embedded systems as a student intern. Without internet, learning about your hardware/ROM was paramount from magazines and word-of-mouth.
Another thing that I learned from that time is how to make designs fast and small. This is a skill that's not really taught, shared, or practiced much and makes a huge positive impact on a codebase keeping it light on abstraction depth and high on flexible capability. Huge improvement to maintainability and extension into unforeseen directions too.
- comrade1234
I had a project at a private bank where we couldn't use the internet - we had to turn our phones in when we checked in, had to use their computers on their network, couldn't access the outside internet... we did have access to api documents electronically thankfully. If we wanted to update a library it had to go through a big security review that took weeks.
It slowed work down a lot but was totally fine - the bank was paying us tons of money hourly.
- robrain
Grab BBC Basic manual (supplied with the computer) off the shelf, switch my Model B on (later Master). Within milliseconds a fresh working environment is created (ie a cursor starts flashing next to a “>”) and I’m off to the races.
Hope the tape recorder works to save my work every hour or so. Switch on my Epson fx80 to dump hard copy.
Simpler, happier times.
- raychis
This period lasted quite some time. In the mid 00s it was still like this. I remember writing code in notepad and vim. Version managers like tortoiseSVN were a total game changer when it came to collaborating.
I still think learning like this is the best way to truly understand things. Neovim still my favourite IDE.