If I had known what the usenet was at the time I would have really found useful. I was super ignorant of those types of things until I was about 14 or 15.

I'll consolidate our discussion into this one thread, in saying that I did use the internet to learn but I used it rather poorly. My Google-fu was rather terrible when I was younger. Tackling a large subject like programming was not easy for me when I basically had no footholds or easy ways to enter that body of knowledge.

I cannot imagine how hard it must have been to learn how to program without the internet though I think that as we build more powerful consumer-grade computing systems, the hurdles involved in getting into programming get higher and become more numerous.