OpenAI’s Library
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
15 years ago, most tech companies had a library of sorts because it was required. Sure, there were manuals online, but they didn't offer the depth available in books at the time.
Stack Overflow either didn't exist or was in its infancy, so your options were to either find an O'Reilly book on the subject[0], hop in a Freenode channel on IRC and talk to folks who were in the weeds (or even the maintainers themselves), or you had to use mailing lists.
[0] - okay, not all of the books were O'Reilly but a huge number of them around that time period were
I remember our startup didn't have a library, but we had one dude who had an entire shelf of O'Reilly books that the company bought for him, so it was sort of our defacto library. When he got laid off, it was like vultures circling a kill to get his books into the IT pen so we would have them.
When I got laid off the company let me take some of them home, and that is what started my home collection of O'Reilly books, and that was in 2001. By 2009 we didn't really use books anymore -- it was all on the internet.
No Girard, N Weiner, Ellul, W Benjamin, W Gibson.