Aye - when I were a lad, there wasn't widespread access to the internet, and personal computers were rare.
Gaining access to a computer meant waiting for your turn on a time-sharing terminal.

If you wanted a datasheet it was literally a sheet of paper - or, more likely, part of a thousand-page Data Book. As you can imagine, manufacturers didn't give these away willy-nilly.

If you wanted to search for information for your project, you had to get up off your backside and take a walk to the library, where you had to manually browse through the card index, microfilm, volumes of abstracts, etc, etc.
When you found something that sounded hopeful, you had to get up off your backside again, walk to the appropriate shelf, find the actual book, journal, or whatever, then sit down and read it. That's assuming that your library actually carried the volume - otherwise you'd have to order it on an inter-library loan.

If you wanted a copy of an article to take back for further study, you'd have to pay for photocopying.

If you found some "sample code", it'd be just a printed listing - there'd be nowhere to download it from, and nowhere to download it to! So you'd just have to re-type it all by hand.

That was Real Work

Youth O' Today don't know they're born - with all this modern internet, and google, and online this and downloable that...