Only about 25 years too late :D, but that would have been cool to know about.
It does make me think though about how I might have discovered such a thing at that point in time.
I don't think I even had internet at home then, I never used things like a BBS and later I was never big into forums either. So the only way I really learnt things was either through fiddling (which is how I found out about the parallel cable networking) or through word of mouth.
It also might not have occurred to me yet how to find answers on the internet and besides, there was no Google back then.
There also wasn't any local community I was aware of that was into these kinds of things. So I only learnt very limited amounts.
I guess I could have tried computing magazines which may also have helped, but I didn't have any real money then, and it's also possible that the options were very slim in South Africa anyhow.
It’s really hard for anyone under 25/30 to appreciate how hard it was for information to come by.
I vividly remember loving a song that was playing on a store’s radio and then standing there for half an hour until the spokesman eventually listed all songs he had played. I did my best to identify and memorize the author, so I could later look them up on a music store.
Here are some offline methods other people used to get such information:
1. magazines and "zines"
2. books
3. word-of-mouth (as you said)
4. clubs or meet-ups
Online methods that pre-date google:
1. newsgroups (usenet)
2. yahoo groups
3. bbses
4. forums
5. msdn
6. other search engines, even ones that used categories like yahoo were sometimes effective. It just took longer to search to find exactly what you wanted
7. manufacturer websites. for example if you need the pin settings for a WD MFM or RLL disk drive, go to the WD website and look it up.
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It wasn't as bad as people think. It just took a long more time to find.
Additionally, when available, information was frequently of higher quality than is readily available online.
Even today, it's probably easier to find detailed, accurate technical documentation for OpenVMS and z/OS — where developers can't just be expected to "Google it" — than it is for Windows, Linux, or Apple OSes.
Moreover, pre-Internet, I never encountered a scenario where important documentation was only available in video form. At worst, you'd very rarely see consumer products bundled with a videocassette for users who couldn't be bothered to RTFM.
Sharing information is certainly easier today, as magazines, user group memberships, long-distance BBS calls, and in-person conferences present a far more significant barrier to entry than the Web.
The trend seems to be reversing, however, as more and more information once available over the Web now seems to be siloed in systems like Facebook and Discord that are neither searchable via Google nor regularly archived by the Internet Archive.
What I wouldn't give for a "Usenet 2.0", i.e., a widely-used, persistent, open, distributed discussion system to reverse this trend.
It does make me think though about how I might have discovered such a thing at that point in time.
I don't think I even had internet at home then, I never used things like a BBS and later I was never big into forums either. So the only way I really learnt things was either through fiddling (which is how I found out about the parallel cable networking) or through word of mouth.
It also might not have occurred to me yet how to find answers on the internet and besides, there was no Google back then.
There also wasn't any local community I was aware of that was into these kinds of things. So I only learnt very limited amounts.
I guess I could have tried computing magazines which may also have helped, but I didn't have any real money then, and it's also possible that the options were very slim in South Africa anyhow.