Just sharing some perspective. I got started in the early and mid 90s. I became obsessed with MUDs as a teenager. I needed a compiler, discovered Linux. Painstakingly downloaded and installed it using over a dozen floppy disks. My Internet was a 28.8-56k modem in that era. I got extremely good at C because that is what CircleMUD was based on. I had a pile of reference manuals, man pages, and Usenet. Occasionally things like Beej’s guides were useful. I also wrote a decent amount of Perl. If I wanted to learn something, like Regex, it was source code, man pages, info pages or an O’Reilly book. Internet hunting was secondary to trusted resources (books, etc).

Certainly some things were harder and slower, but if forced you to use your brain more and think through some types of issues. You rarely got instant gratification of reading someone else’ solution to your weird problem or error.

It forced you to really look through the source code and think things through from first principles. To understand your runtime (C programs barely have a runtime really, but it still exists in complex programs that must run for long periods like a MUD). It forced a deep knowledge of your tool chains and made you really good at them. It forced you to be more narrow but also creative and deep. From a first principles perspective it taught me ways of working that are different to younger programmers, and even modern me. Often looking something up is right. But sometimes you are best served by learning something for yourself, through source code and such. I learned so much looking at other code based and constantly asking “why?”. Why is this code this way, etc. I can’t say if it’s better or worse, but I got really good at MUDs and it turned into a long career in tech with no degree :)