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I almost want to ask if this is a real question. Obviously, things have changed since then, but there was a time that not everyone had 24/7 always-on access to the Internet. Really, that's only a recent thing. How do you think programming took place -- across a generation or two -- before then? In my case, it was 1999 before I was able to get an Internet connection that wasn't dial-up Internet -- but I lived in a small, rural town in the midwest, not in a major city. I was the first person in our area (perhaps a 30 mile radius) to have an "oh-my-$deity-this is-so-amazingly-fast" 768k/128k DSL line (besides the two guys who ran my ISP) as I knew them and they asked if I would, effectively, be a "beta tester" to make sure things were working as they 2were supposed to be before they started offering the service to customers. So, yeah, before then it was possible to program without a Internet connection. That was the "default", normal situation, in fact. We had (dead-tree) books, for example, and could telephone other people, there was FIDOnet ("before Internet"), Usenet ("after Internet"), e-mail and mailing lists and, eventually, even the web (from 1991 on, of course). Plenty of programming happened without Internet access before then (in fact, all of it did, basically). Of course, some programming is more complicated nowadays, when you need a library for every little thing you do, so I suppose programming without an Internet connection might not be possible if you need to download a library for for .. loops or something. (By the way, when I was in high school, I'd write code on paper (whatever program I was working on at the time) while sitting in class. When I'd get home after school, then I could type it in on the computer.) Of course, if you are one of those "programmers" who have to stop and Google something afte every five lines of code, well, it's probably not possible. |