Comment by anonnon

Even people with the Internet growing up still learned largely through books, probably until StackOverflow really took off. One "hack" prior to SO that sometimes goes under-acknowledged was Google Groups. Around 2000, they bought and made free to the public the entire Deja News USENET archive, and suddenly you could search comp.lang.whatever and usually find someone who'd asked (and someone who answered) whatever question you had. And the signal-to-noise ratio was extremely high, given the barriers to entry (technical and financial) to being active on USENET's technical groups in the 90s.

Of course, asking a question was another matter, likely to result in a rebuke for violating the group's arcane decorum. But given how pervasive "RTFM" culture was back then, most "n00bs" were content to do just that (RTFM) until they came up against something that genuinely wasn't covered in some FAQ or manpage.