There were programmer sites/mailing lists before that where knowledgeable people gathered, and today you can search directly on SO, or use DDG as I do. Also, I used AltaVista before google, and often got answers there, though success was less frequent.
Therefore, at no point in time have I been dependent on google, though it was helpful about five to ten years ago. So, my impression is that SO was the bigger innovation, though YMMV of course.
I hate to think what it would mean to be dependent on SO.
I think overall we are agreeing. USENET and various sites were a huge jump from the state of things before hand, when your available resources really depended on location. SO is a more useful interface on top of that stuff and easier to access, but the real innovation was made decades earlier.
The nice thing about Usenet is that you had access to real experts. If your question was good enough, you could get an answer from someone that wrote the drivers for the OS you were struggling with or whatever.
Before that, you'd get books out of the library and get a pad of paper and hand-assemble 6502 code and read Byte magazine and if it took a long time, you learned it very very solidly. So I'd say I got a level of deep understanding from hand-assembling code for 6502 that I (as a fogey) doubt I would ever get from any amount of SO reading. Tho my general work flow once I start typing is to google every thing that I can't instantly fix; weird compiler error, cut and paste into search bar, optionally add "stack" to the end and read.
Yes. There is a lot more information out there now, but the average quality is a lot lower. This isn't unreasonable given the growth of the industry, and the number of people who do at least some programming as part of their job but are mostly doing glue programming. These days that's the majority of a much larger group, thought it used to be much smaller.
> There were programmer sites/mailing lists before that where knowledgeable people gathered
Agreed. I remember using https://www.codeproject.com/ a lot, back in the day. The quality was often variable, but being able to search for function-names and see them in use was very useful.
Especially when the only alternative was years-old MFC books in the local library.
Therefore, at no point in time have I been dependent on google, though it was helpful about five to ten years ago. So, my impression is that SO was the bigger innovation, though YMMV of course.