I wrote code (I am old) before stack overflow. Google existed, and it was even still in the honeymoon phase where "don't be evil" was almost plausible. But search engines were not yet a good tool for solving esoteric programming questions.

But honestly, the practice of programming then was not dramatically different from programming in, say, the mid-2010s. Obviously we leaned more heavily on the official documentation, and tbf, a lot of the docs were provided in PDFs, which is probably the single worst way to provide documentation.

Sometimes, the docs were provided as collections of papers bound together by a "spine". This is actually a wonderful documentation format because our brains can associate physical locations in the physical media with specific pieces of information.

(this is the oldest I have ever been in my entire life)

ROFL--I suspect the previous commenter hadn't lived through the 90's, let alone coded in them. You tell 'em!