[WhyOhWhyQ]

Books aren't just a lower quality version of dialog with a person though. They operate entirely differently. With very few people can you think quietly for 30 minutes straight without talking, but with a book you can put it down and come back to it at will.

I don't think professional programmers were using notepad in 1985. Here's talk of IDEs from an article from 1985: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800225.806843 It mentions Xerox Development Environment, from 1977 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Development_Environment

The feedback loop for programming / mathematics / other things I've studied was not a week in the year 2019. In that ancient time the feedback look was maybe 10% slower than with any of these LLMs since you had to look at Google search.