The closest to vibecoding in the 90's was to open Borland's Turbo C help in any page, copy and paste the example and modify it until you understand it or until it did what you wanted.
Microsoft Quick Basic help was also gold.
Microsoft Quick Basic help was also gold.
I started up QBasic knowing nothing other than that it seemed like a thing for programming computers and programming seemed like a cool thing to do.
I typed in random words, and eventually I typed "screen". When I pushed enter, QBasic capitalized it, so it seemed important. I hit F1 and read the help. It made no sense, but the example ran and had other capitalized words so I could repeat the process.
Eventually I started making really terrible text-based Final Fantasy knock-offs.
Still, you can find an awful lot of solutions there, no question
Learning about heap allocation was euphoric. I kept beaming because I had unlocked infinite memory, and people around me didn't get why I was such a happy teenager.
To be fair, I already knew about memory regions from PEEK/POKEing on a commodore as a child, but it was always static and pre-populated.