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When I started as a developer the internet wasn't there. If you wanted a new library or tool you had to go to a shop and buy the floppy disks (or mailorder). If you wanted docs you used the man pages or had to buy the book, probably the bookstore would order it for you. Its hard to imagine now.

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I was 18 and moved to Univeristy where I "met the Internet".

And yet I find it hard to recall life before having mobile phones to easily coordinate meeting friends, google maps to navigate, banking apps for account and bill management.

Clearly I had a life before internet. Clearly I coped. I just can't recall how.

I’m a millennial, and that is hard to imagine. Though, some of my favorite coding exercises have been writing something for which there already exists a library, so I’d probably have learned a lot more of nitty gritty details if I had grown up in that kind of environment.

It was liberating as there wasn't this continual firehose of new applications, tools and ideas. There weren't as many developers around and you also didn't know how good many other teams were. You just had your little world of getting your application to work.

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