@aziz I remember that in the 80s, information was still a scarce resource and hard to find - so hoarding documentation, magazines, source code and whatever you could get your hands on was very useful to learn and experiment. As well as using BBS to discuss and connect with friends “online”. When finally Internet came along it was such an amazing and unbelievable feeling of abundance.
Also now days a lot of work is understanding and reusing frameworks and libraries. In the past it was more common writing low level code and had-hoc data structures, and creating a skeleton of a framework.