This is pretty cool on its own but the fact you did it before the internet using a newspaper is very interesting. I really struggle to imagine how I'd do anything without looking online.
This sounds snarky but I don't mean it as such. It's what was available and how much knowledge was passed around. It wasn't hard to learn about even esoteric things if you had a good library. It was hard to find more than one such book though, so there wasn't as much opportunity for expansion of knowledge by comparing approaches.
I like the internet age better though it has become more challenging to separate fact and fiction. The library didn't have too many fake science books.
As a kid, I found the UFO section of the library and read all kinds of interesting and almost certainly not true things. It was conveniently next to the programming books ..
Popular Mechanics and other "Popular xxx" magazines are also examples. If you were lucky your local library subscribed so you could read them there (hopefully people hadn't stolen the issues or ripped pages out.)
It was however also just harder and more limited. I definitely had projects in school that required looking through the library stacks and probably ended up with more "winging it" and depending on one or two old sources than would be the case today.
I enjoyed the film Desk Set. Katherine Hepburn is one of those librarians, working at a pseudo-NBC company in the 50s. (As a special bonus, it features early movie mainframe hijinks.)
On the one hand, barring natural disaster/fire/water leaks/etc., your library book will last a good long time--at least until the library gets rid of it because they need the space and no one's checked it out recently. On the other hand, even with inter-library loan, it's not super-accessible especially if it's in, say, a private university library. And if something does happen to it, it's gone.
On the other hand, a single digital copy won't last as long. But subject to a lot of factors and caveats, copies of that digital artifact can last indefinitely.