No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

7/26/2026 at 11:54:12 AM

Yeah, I'll never forget pirating Turbo Pascal off of AOL in the 90s, going to my local library and taking out a book about Turbo Pascal so I could learn what I could do with it. Ended up coding a program that embedded metadata for all of Rush's songs, their titles, and how long they were, so that you could plan out a mixtape of just Rush's songs. Even allowed you to specify what kind of tape you had, so you could adjust each side, whether it was 45 minutes or 30 minutes, things like that. It was called Rush Mixtape Creator, and I shared the compiled binary on Usenet. Got emails about it as long as six years later asking me to make changes and update it. It was the first actual program I ever distributed. 1995.

Coding was different back then.

by rpdillon

7/26/2026 at 10:39:34 AM

I had a project at a private bank where we couldn't use the internet - we had to turn our phones in when we checked in, had to use their computers on their network, couldn't access the outside internet... we did have access to api documents electronically thankfully. If we wanted to update a library it had to go through a big security review that took weeks.

It slowed work down a lot but was totally fine - the bank was paying us tons of money hourly.

by comrade1234

7/26/2026 at 1:00:23 PM

It was same for some Nokia projects, it was called "blackbox" model (other people where not allowed to see in the room you were developing in).

Possible but very inefficient way of doing things.

Also very secure.

by miohtama

7/26/2026 at 10:49:59 AM

Grab BBC Basic manual (supplied with the computer) off the shelf, switch my Model B on (later Master). Within milliseconds a fresh working environment is created (ie a cursor starts flashing next to a “>”) and I’m off to the races.

Hope the tape recorder works to save my work every hour or so. Switch on my Epson fx80 to dump hard copy.

Simpler, happier times.

by robrain

7/26/2026 at 11:04:02 AM

Those manuals were fantastic. I was still coding on our Beeb in the early 90s and I wanted the assembly manual. My dad ordered it from Acorn but it never arrived. Ended up going to the small claims court to get our money back.

In the late 90s, I wanted to learn x86 assembly and sent an email to Intel asking for their reference manuals. They sent four huge volumes to me for free. I've no idea whether that was a mistake, but I was very grateful.

I still can't believe any of us were able to write programs just from reading books, and I'm not sure to what extent that's even possible today. Even online documentation now seems really crappy compared to those old manuals.

by momentoftop

7/26/2026 at 11:02:03 AM

Memory error - it was a Seikosha dot matrix I used back then. The FX80 came later.

by robrain

7/26/2026 at 11:48:44 AM

This period lasted quite some time. In the mid 00s it was still like this. I remember writing code in notepad and vim. Version managers like tortoiseSVN were a total game changer when it came to collaborating. I still think learning like this is the best way to truly understand things. Neovim still my favourite IDE.

by raychis

7/26/2026 at 6:00:15 PM

Definitely, up to 2003 I only had access to dial up outside work, meaning I could not just go online every time I felt like doing it.

And during the 90's while at the university, not even that, at home zero Internet, I could not afford paying for dial up as student, other expenses were more relevant.

You would regularly find students on the campus at weekend that were there only to check stuff on Internet.

by pjmlp

7/26/2026 at 5:42:25 PM

The thing that I really liked was that you felt like you were programming for the hardware and not really for an OS. Most systems ran a single program at a time so you pretty much had full control except for interrupts. On DOS TSR (terminate, stay resident) interrupt handlers could also do amazing things.

Knowing a lot about my personal computer (Atari 400 and later Atari ST) made it so easy to do work on embedded systems as a student intern. Without internet, learning about your hardware/ROM was paramount from magazines and word-of-mouth.

Another thing that I learned from that time is how to make designs fast and small. This is a skill that's not really taught, shared, or practiced much and makes a huge positive impact on a codebase keeping it light on abstraction depth and high on flexible capability. Huge improvement to maintainability and extension into unforeseen directions too.

by karmakaze

7/26/2026 at 12:03:38 PM

I memorized the z80 instruction in hex and would code Basic and data 3E, 15, CD, 00, C0, etc just as if it was readable and wrote many games with that. It was nice income for a 10 year old kid in the 80s and even better after. It does slightly suck more now, but AI does help making it similar; focus on the important parts, not this garbage around it.

by anonzzzies

7/26/2026 at 6:34:55 PM

Loved that era. Although my main computing back then involved the "Skinny Mac" and (at work) PCs, I also tinkered with eight-bit Ataris. Even got a very bare-bones Atari BASIC program, "Line Deleter," published in the January, 1986, issue of COMPUTE! Magazine.[0]

[0]: https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/index/?issue=issue68

by brycewray

7/26/2026 at 12:36:41 PM

You can always just use vim, no plugins, and a book. No one said that one must use a fancy IDE and online stuff.

by BirAdam

7/26/2026 at 12:59:04 PM

This varies wildly person to person but for me, it's not only about the means. It's a combination of means and end. If I want the computer to do something, and the only way to get it to do so is read a book and tinker, the reading and tinkering are very fun. If I could just ask the computer in plain English (which I can now), I would. Of course it's way less of a fun journey then. But just reading and tinkering with no extrinsic element is not a fun journey.

by resonious

7/26/2026 at 1:19:17 PM

i understand this very well. i’m trying to work through SICP but without a goal i’m struggling even though i enjoy LISP. on the other hand i’m playing Mindustry[1] in which you can use a kind of domain specific assembly language called mlog, and there’s very little documentation and no in-game console for error messages, so the code either works or doesn’t and you have to manually print assertions to understand what’s going wrong. in some ways similar to this article. we had an intro to 8085 in school but beyond that i would otherwise have never bothered to learn low level stuff, but i’m having a very good time now.

AI tools can write mlog but there’s not much of it out there so they frequently make errors, making it even more of a “you’re on your own” experience. i recommend the game anyway (it’s libre) but the opportunity to code this way has considerably added to the enjoyment for me.

[1] https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry

by pitchlatte

7/26/2026 at 6:01:43 PM

Actually no, because vim was created in 1991, during the 80s it was classical vi.

by pjmlp

7/26/2026 at 6:13:30 PM

Most Linux systems just symlink vim to vi, and it launches in a compatibility mode. Vim without plugins is still close. Old workflows can still be achieved. The user simply has to really want that experience.

by BirAdam

7/26/2026 at 6:54:19 PM

Another one, Linux did not exist in the 1980's.

Naturally the old workflows are achievable today, including the TUI craziness, as if curses and dialog never happened.

by pjmlp

7/26/2026 at 7:16:07 PM

Sure, but people could also just use BSD. The point is not vim or Linux. The point is that what the author appears to enjoy, a simple editor and a book, is easily accomplished still today.

by BirAdam

7/26/2026 at 1:15:58 PM

That's not enough as the abstraction of hardware and software has increased exponentially. Not only that expectations are more. Just building for a definitive set of single configuration is not enough. Any software needs to run on Amd64, RiscV, Arm64, has to be containerised, and run on OsX, Windows, Linux.. Nowadays you would need more and more knowledge/experience to be able to function without external help.

by fsniper

7/26/2026 at 12:58:57 PM

Yeah, all the computer science students in the dorms would collaborate on homework assignments, but I was a non-traditional student living in a small home near the college campus, so no interaction on that front, unless no one in the dorms was able to solve something, then I'd get a phone call and would try to coach people through the solution over the phone, or would walk to the lab, printout in hand....

Failed the 301 Systems Programming class because C on my NeXT Cube was sufficiently different from the compiler in the labs and I never managed to work out how to bridge that gap mentally....

by WillAdams

7/26/2026 at 10:52:11 AM

I did an independent study of C in high school in 2003.

I sat at a non-internet-connected terminal in the back of the TechED room and typed examples from the provided book into a very simple editor. Sometimes they compiled and worked. Sometimes they did not work despite being to all appearances character for character the same as the book, and I was often left with no idea why.

It was not an entirely unfamiliar experience. I had a Mattel Aquarius as a young child and spent countless hours typing games in from the back of the manual before attempting to save them to cassette.

by donatj

7/26/2026 at 3:04:52 PM

> Sometimes they did not work despite being to all appearances character for character the same as the book, and I was often left with no idea why.

The book may have been wrong - between 2000 and 2005 there were a ton of programming books that were flat out wrong. Many of these were C books.

Just one example: the examples from https://wozniak.ca/blog/2018/06/25/1/index.html are full of UB and are almost guaranteed to crash.

by lelanthran

7/26/2026 at 3:11:38 PM

Information was so much more scarce back then. Made programming feel like a black art. I remember when I learned about overlays in Turbo Pascal, it felt like I learned a new spell :)

by pogopop77

7/26/2026 at 1:34:36 PM

Dont forget: Back then, after shoving tons of floppy disks (later 600MB CDs) for installing just the IDE and the compiler etc., you had to shovel another tower of media into the machine just to get the "help/doc" function installed :-D

by KellyCriterion

7/26/2026 at 6:03:32 PM

A customised mix of Turbo Pascal and MS-DOS 3.3 could fit in a 3.5 inch high density floppy, meaning 1.44 MB for the young folks.

I know that because I used to carry one for use on high school computer lab.

Then a couple others for programs.

by pjmlp

7/26/2026 at 7:12:47 PM

Visual C++ was one CD + at least 2 x MSDN CDs

Turbo Pascal for Windows: https://www.techspot.com/news/101067-turbo-pascal-celebrates...

This was, IIRC, several floppy discs?

by KellyCriterion

7/26/2026 at 7:44:41 PM

Except you are talking about mid-90s already.

TPW was about 7 disks, and when it got released, there were already 6 versions released for MS-DOS.

Followed by Turbo Pascal 7 for MS-DOS still, with TPW being replaced with Delphi.

by pjmlp

7/26/2026 at 11:29:28 AM

Even early 2000s my experience coding was writing code, building it at my PC, copying it to a floppy, carrying it to the device I worked on In the lab, burning the NVRAM with it, rebooting it, and seeing if it worked. Debugging meant manually typing in memory addresses into the keypad to inspect (I had the address of every global var in the system).

For deeply thought intensive tasks like “why did the system crash” I printed out pages of C code and hand-executed code to find places with invalid memory access. For example a null pointer wouldn’t segfault and print a nice stack trace, it’d just overwrite the in memory code itself.

It was laborious but lots of fun. I learned a ton about C and embedded programming

by softwaredoug

7/26/2026 at 11:27:23 AM

Memories of coding in FoxPro 2.5, with the reference manual on my lap. I wasn't the original programmer, so I had to figure out another guy's copypasta.

There were BBSes back then where you could often find help from others or share code. Not just mail and magazines.

by projektfu

7/26/2026 at 11:00:05 AM

> But something also got lost along the way, and it's that obligation to read slowly, to understand every line because there was no shortcut available

Not really sure what got "lost" here. But fundamentally nothing has really changed much, except for deeper abstractions, more powerful tools and the cost of "generating" (or producing) code approaching near zero (if you discount the cost of subscriptions to Claude/Codex, etc and the underlying costs of running those st scale).

You still have to understand, and read every line. Although now we just get tools to do so for us. But the understanding is still a requirement.

by prologic

7/26/2026 at 11:28:39 AM

In VB6 I just scrolled the autocomplete dropdown in the 2005 IDE to find what's possible + Some random answer from codeproject.com

The good times...

by yonixw

7/26/2026 at 11:38:59 AM

My first computer from the 80's had autocomplete: ZX80.

Was only BASIC, but needed as there wasn't any way to save...

by stAInley

7/26/2026 at 2:57:35 PM

I had a ZX81. I remember copying hexadecimal lines of code from magazines using the tiny "keyboard". At least the hexadecimal code had checksums on every line, it made it a little easier to spot errors, but had to translate to Z80 machine code to be able to see any code at all! :)

by xcf_seetan

7/26/2026 at 10:53:34 AM

Copying scripts from books is still the best way to learn, and still the only choice in some areas.

by opengrass

7/26/2026 at 1:36:32 PM

Trends will come and go but vim will always be here.

by jway66

7/26/2026 at 10:11:58 AM

Maybe not 80s, but I vaguely remember visual basic 4 having autocomplete...

by nubinetwork

7/26/2026 at 12:42:20 PM

In 1990, I was using the BRIEF editor on MS-DOS, which was an editor for programmers and which was quite similar to Emacs (also including a scripting language somewhat similar to LISP). BRIEF must have already existed for some years.

It had a completely configurable auto-complete, which I rewrote to insert big code templates in the languages that I was using (C, C++, Fortran, Basic, assembly), covering almost all boilerplate that I encountered at that time.

The BRIEF editor for programmers was one of the best software products that I have ever used. Nothing that I encountered later on Windows approached it in customizability. Actually I find it strange that I cannot recall any Windows program that I would consider as a high-quality software product, while there are a handful of programs for MS-DOS that I consider as examples of high-quality, even decades later (e.g. the programming editor BRIEF, the file manager XTree, the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3, the technical drawing program AutoCAD for MS-DOS; all these were extremely customizable).

Nowadays Emacs may have even more customizable features, but it has always been more opaque for newbies. BRIEF was instantly usable on an IBM PC clone, even if discovering its advanced features could require some time.

Despite having used continuously for 3 decades various UNIX-derived operating systems, including Solaris, FreeBSD and Linux, only this year I have switched to Emacs, in order to recreate the great programming experience that I had with BRIEF many years ago. Emacs includes all that is necessary, but it requires a much longer initial study in comparison with BRIEF, before becoming able to master it, which is why I hesitated for a long time before trying it.

by adrian_b

7/26/2026 at 3:21:46 PM

I started a job (moving cities for this new job) in 2004 and found my boss (at that time, a grizzled old veteran of computing) using BRIEF.

I recall him trying to convince me to switch to it a few times, from vim. I never found it as advanced as vim, but I could see the capabilities. I recall being impressed by some macro he had that improved navigation, both within a file and opening new files.

I also recall him being impressed when I showed him vim's ctags commands.

Good times. Pity he was a mean SOB.

by lelanthran

7/26/2026 at 8:12:29 PM

Out-of-the-box, BRIEF was not especially impressive.

Its strength was its embedded scripting language, which may have been inspired by Emacs LISP.

With the scripting language, you could change everything, including the behavior of any key press or of any combination of keys.

Thus you could create a personalized editor that had no resemblance with BRIEF as originally delivered and you could parse the source text of the edited programs and do arbitrary transformations or analyses and you could invoke any external tools for building a software project and it handled the compiling error messages, so it could work as a complete IDE. It also included a tiled windows manager.

Therefore, it is likely that there have been as many different BRIEF editors as BRIEF users, as long as they hacked the set of scripts originally delivered with it.

The only editor that I am aware of and which has a so powerful scripting language is Emacs and its derivatives. Because Emacs is even older than BRIEF, I assume that it was the source of inspiration for BRIEF. I have used vim for many years. I was satisfied with it, but it was not so easy to customize as BRIEF was.

by adrian_b

7/26/2026 at 5:17:31 PM

You can always recreate it for Windows or Linux. Perfect hobby hehe

by iberator

7/26/2026 at 8:34:50 PM

Looking now at the corresponding Wikipedia page, I see that actually there have already been created a few clones, both for Windows and for Linux.

I have not used BRIEF for Windows, so I do not know if it was as good as BRIEF for MS-DOS. Unfortunately, most of the great MS-DOS programs had versions ported to Windows that were quite disappointing.

This allowed Microsoft to create competitive Windows products that grabbed the market from the former MS-DOS market leaders, like with Microsoft Office. Of course, Microsoft cheated in many cases, because its internal developers frequently used Windows OS interfaces that were not yet known to outsiders because they were planned for the next Windows release or interfaces that were undocumented and which remained undocumented, unless someone reverse engineered them.

by adrian_b

7/26/2026 at 10:27:40 AM

Which is why when being on UNIX, and having only vi, Emacs and XEmacs available, with basic tools like ctags, unless being lucky to work at some place paying for really expensive UNIX IDEs felt like a downgrade for folks raised in Amiga/PC world.

by pjmlp

7/26/2026 at 1:29:33 PM

man studio and the like were really helpful trying to figure out what something did in a piece of code

by saturn_vk

7/26/2026 at 11:38:00 AM

This period latest until the mid 00s. I remember trying to learn Java in the early 00s and it was really hard and I needed a textbook.

No blogs, no SO, no autocomplete, crappy IDEs, no AI, etc...

I miss that difficult focused learning. The smallest successes felt like huge accomplishments.

by kypro

7/26/2026 at 1:46:41 PM

I remember using usenet newsgroups (outlook express anyone :-) The Wrox books had a mailing list where you could reply or ask questions by email... I used those a lot.. in the beginning to ask and in the end I was answering more and more

by minkeymaniac

7/26/2026 at 12:51:21 PM

We had SWAG for pascal

by gmerc

7/26/2026 at 10:12:41 AM

> Debugging, back then, was an almost physical thing. Comparing character by character what was on screen against what was printed on the page. Realizing that the "1" that looked like a lowercase "l" had tricked you for half an hour.

And the 0 and 8. And this was used by some copy-protection to try to prevent reverse engineering. Back then real debuggers (by "real debugger" I mean not just "debugging in your head": but an actual, although very minimal, debugger) were very simplistic too, and so you'd read everything line by line, keeping in your head what the program was doing, was the register contained, what subroutines would do etc. And then you'd have "tricks" by the copy protection where that line with a '0' you just analyzed a few commands before would turn, sneakily, into a '8' (maybe by a function or a side effect of a command etc.).

And when we'd spot it we'd be: "Wait dude, did you notice how sneaky it is, this actually turns the 0 into an 8, so the next this execute, everything shall be corrupt" (or something like that).

And so debuggers got enhanced: for example if anything on screen got modified, the modified value would flash than stay in green. Stuff like that.

Our tools were much more basic.

But then we learned to eat 68x00 and x86 opcodes for breakfast.

by TacticalCoder

7/26/2026 at 3:00:46 PM

This also marked peak IQ by humans developers...

by tcp_handshaker

7/26/2026 at 1:46:22 PM

Software was way simpler back then.

by stackedinserter

7/26/2026 at 12:21:26 PM

Nothing would get me more frustrated than copying code from a magazine for it to not work because they published something wrong.

by brazukadev

7/26/2026 at 12:07:41 PM

The more sophisticated magazines had CRC codes after every line, so you could know where in the code you has mistyped.

by curtisblaine

7/26/2026 at 1:52:26 PM

I remember enhancing the F-PC visual editor to display the checksum for the current line because I did not have access to whatever method the magazine recommended (maybe OCR with Logitech Scanman?).

by fweimer

7/26/2026 at 12:24:04 PM

Compute!'s Gazette first began offering BASIC programs to type in. These became more elaborate over time, and then they announced a revolutionary concept: they began publishing programs written in machine language, for maximum compactness and performance.

But alongside these machine-language programs, they published a short BASIC editor, and this is how you typed in the machine code. It was all numbers, and the editor program would calculate the CRC, and it could flag typos, so you could re-enter the bad lines. That was way better than arduously entering DATA statements in BASIC, or just having a malfunction because of a typo in those programs.

This stuff was all rather magical for me. At first I didn't even have a storage device. I'd type in short BASIC programs, shut off the machine, and they'd be wiped: gone forever. Of course, with the Commodore computers, there was always an option to purchase cartridge-based software that was durable.

Eventually I had a Datasette cassette recorder, so I could save those programs I'd typed in. It was quite amazing to be able to finally save my own stuff, or the magazine programs.

by ButlerianJihad

7/26/2026 at 10:39:47 AM

[flagged]

by reindeer2

7/26/2026 at 12:42:14 PM

[dead]

by theturtle