Pre-dating the internet myself, I'm wondering how much of a reliance is placed on the Internet as a resource to find algorithms, code examples, ask questions, etc...
If the internet was not available, would you have the skills, knowledge and ability to code what you needed?
IOW - If you didn't have the internet, could you still write the code you needed to write in the same amount of time?
(i.e. Imagine trying to code for an iPhone without online resources)
Yes.
I still have my local library and IT bookstore.
That's how I got interested in programming in the first place.
But I guess it depends on the platform you're writing on too.
While the immediacy of the Internet is always useful, I still refer to books, peers' code samples and just conversation with other developers. Other peoples' experience is at least as valuable as the Internet, as is written material.
People seemed to manage writing code in Fortran, Basic and C well before the Internet really took off. They would have achieved this through the other communication channels that we either tend to take for granted or (in extreme cases) actively avoid.
Now if your question was "Would you be able to achieve the same levels of productivity without the Internet", you might well get very different results since that immediate availability of information is such an important factor for getting the answers you need now.
If every library I used shipped with full documentation it would be possible, I think.
Of course not. I have a library of computer books covering a wide range of topics, from pre-Internet days. I'll tell you, even if my library was complete and up-to-date, it would take DAYS to perform the kind of research possible within minutes with the Internet.
But that's just a small part of it. Libraries. Open source software. These are things that could never proliferate as much as they do without the Internet, because they feed on the user feed back, on easy availability, and on word-of-mouth propaganda.
Yes. But it would make it much harder with a greater reliance on printed manuals.
Well it used to be possible...
But basically at this point it's like asking how you could continue to be a lumberjack if your arms fell off. You literally cannot imagine the answer, and it seems an esoteric question indeed.
You ask "without the Internet". May we still have usenet, and FTP sites? I used to get a lot of good stuff from ftp.digital.com. How about CompuServe and AOL?
No. On some levels. Yes on others.
As a web architect, there'd be no job for me without the internet.
None of my tools would exist without the internet. I doubt Python or Django would exist in without an internet to distribute and an internet community to support them.
Lacking those tools, I'd be left with MS products or IBM products (Visual REXX?) or Oracle products downloaded to my PC.
Think of the early days of MSDN subscriptions delivered on CD's. I'd be stuck with giant, poorly-documented hardware-specific libraries. [Yes. With no internet, the notion of compatibility would be right out the window. Every computer chip maker would have a unique solution.]
It would be as bad as the old COBOL IMS/DL1 days when your programs were simple Input-Process-Output loops.
But, I would be working just as effectively as I did back in the day. Slowly and with lousy proprietary tools and no internet.
As it turns out, I've had the opportunity to empirically test this question, and the results are that yes, I am able to develop LAMP stack intranet applications without access to the internet.
It is freakin' hard.
I also vastly predate the Internet, but taking it away, I think, would roughly halve my coding productivity today.
The impact would be softened once I had all the needed docs and sources locally installed -- but only if the rate of new tools and technologies I need or want to use (essentially, the rate of progress and change in programming tools and techologies) slowed down very drastically!
Otherwise (i.e. assuming new relevant tools and techs kept coming along at today's pace), the impact on my productivity would stay high, as I'd spend a lot of time procuring and locally installing new materials all the time, not to mention reading more thoroughly through them due to being unable to easily locate docs, code snippets, updated FAQs, etc, etc, via search engines and helpful sites.
Even with the best local arrangement the productivity impact would not go below 20-30% even in the most optimistic scenario -- I well remember what the effort and time waste was to get a bug acknowledged, a workaround to it found, and eventually a fix obtained, back in the late '80s, no matter what theoretically stellar support agreements my employer had...!
I've worked for H3C, one of the biggest network device manufacture for many years. We mainly use C to work on special hardware architectures our proprietary OS, and it's not allowed to use any open source code.
Stability is much more important than development speed, so we don't need to study new programming styles or libraries.
So, we really don't need Internet, we have all what we need in company's network.
But I don't think that's the best choice. After years of working in H3C, many of my colleagues' programming skills are very limited.