I learnt back in the BBC Micro era, when I could get books out of the local library. What I didn't have at that time was a computer - my very first programming had to be done on paper until I could get time on the computers at school.
Later I got a Spectrum; later still a PC. It was vital that these came with BASIC. Paying for development tools would not have happened. Eventually I acquired pirated copies of Turbo Pascal, Microsoft QuickC, and finally a legitimate but already obsolete copy of Borland Turbo C on seven 5.25" floppy disks.
Eventually I also got a modem and could gain access to such troves as the PC Game Programmer's Encyclopedia.
I think the main difference is that if you came up with a question you had to answer it yourself through research or experimentation. If you weren't very persistent, or weren't given the free time to do the necessary self-directed learning, you wouldn't get very far.
Modern knowledge is streamed to you in small fragments. Back then it came in lumps. Multiple-inch-thick lumps. Most of the books were pretty worthless, although the Peter Norton ones I really learnt stuff from.
It was also viable to set out to read the documentation you had cover-to-cover and go looking for interesting or useful things. These days there's almost too much, and it's certainly not linearly structured.
Similar story here. Although the only way I could get my hands on the school computers was intentionally swearing at the dinner ladies and being sent inside to sit in "the boring computer room" because the school had a strict policy of anti-technology in all subjects. They never worked my tactic out and thought I was just disruptive.
My knowledge came mostly from the BBC Micro Users guide and Advanced Users Guide initially. Eventually a dead relative, who I will be eternally grateful for their thought, left me a not insignificant amount of cash and I bought a then new BBC Master!
This eventually made way for a PC and eventually in the mid 1990s, Linux and then I discovered my father had a 1st edition copy of "Programming C" stashed away in a junk box somewhere. Oh and O'Reilly books. I had crates of them at one point.
To actually learn C (not ++) I used Bjarne Stroustrup's C all the way. I think it was 150 pages of book with 10 pages of index, not exactly a heavy book, probably no larger than a 13" screen 'ultrabook' and I took it everywhere.
Back then we had attention spans longer than a goldfish, so studying a book that was so concise was the way to go, not to skim search results, copy and paste.
Before then with the BBC Micro again there were just the two manuals, the one it came with and some advanced one. The ZX81 was okay with just the manual it came with.
Computer magazines were actually how you learned new stuff, or at least saw stuff that you wanted to do, even if the reality was typing in hex-dumps.
A Microsoft study in 2013 said the attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds, whereas we had attention spans of 12 seconds in 2000 and 8 seconds in 2013.
There is a lot of 'averages' here, however, we have changed how we expect to learn things. I have no idea whether it is 'needle, haystack' or the other way around for commands I use daily. We just remember where to find stuff on the internets rather than in our own grey matter.
Similar story with an additional twist. In mid 80's, I was 12 years old. At that age the problem was to realize that documentation existed. I had only access to libraries and a few bookshop. There were very few magazines etc. But to have the real knowledge, I had to understand that my books had to be in english, coming from other countries. At my age, that was somehow hard to realize. Knowledge was there but not easily reachable and, in any case, very expensive. My dad helped me a bit but even at 12 y.o. I was further than him so he couldn't help me efficiently (and well, at that time, 12 year old asking to code in assembly language was, well, so unexpected that he may not have known how to help :-))
But those were the days. We had to experiment like hell (any of you tried to understand the RWTS routines to read/write on Apple2 floppies ? :-)
Later I got a Spectrum; later still a PC. It was vital that these came with BASIC. Paying for development tools would not have happened. Eventually I acquired pirated copies of Turbo Pascal, Microsoft QuickC, and finally a legitimate but already obsolete copy of Borland Turbo C on seven 5.25" floppy disks.
Eventually I also got a modem and could gain access to such troves as the PC Game Programmer's Encyclopedia.
I think the main difference is that if you came up with a question you had to answer it yourself through research or experimentation. If you weren't very persistent, or weren't given the free time to do the necessary self-directed learning, you wouldn't get very far.
Modern knowledge is streamed to you in small fragments. Back then it came in lumps. Multiple-inch-thick lumps. Most of the books were pretty worthless, although the Peter Norton ones I really learnt stuff from.
It was also viable to set out to read the documentation you had cover-to-cover and go looking for interesting or useful things. These days there's almost too much, and it's certainly not linearly structured.