People would come to us with a **problem,** and we would figure out a solution. We couldn't just search the web **because the web was still being written.** And you couldn't just punt a hard question to the engineer in the desk next to you. Why? Because you were sitting alone in a utility closet packed with floppy disks and old tape drives.
“I'm a XXXXX XX webmaster [1]”
Ah, this takes me back. I got my first computer back in 1984, and if I wanted to know anything about it I was on my own. Google didn't exist (the public Internet didn't exist at the time). I didn't have anyone I could ask about computer related things. I did have books and magazines. So between experimentation and learning to read between the lines, I picked up programming.
So when it came time to write a metasearch engine [2], there were no tutorials. There were no open source metasearch engines to download and use. There was only the problem of writing a metasearch engine, in a language I didn't even know [3] (and which itself was less than a year old at the time).
Fun times.
So I always found it odd when people would go online asking for tutorials, especially for writing metasearch engines (and yes, that did happen back then). So when something like testing a negative [4] comes up, and I can't convince the Powers That Be that it's never a good idea to prove a negative, I can't just look up some tutorial on proving negatives—I just have to figure it out on my own [5].
[1] https://justinjackson.ca/webmaster/
[2] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/
[3] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp1.html