The internet existed when I started my software engineering career, but not in a form that anyone except hardcore software types would recognize. Bulletin boards and lists of the best of ftp sites were as user friendly as it got. I was the envy of my fellow computer science students when I got a shiny new 2400 baud modem. Errr eee uhhh buzzz. The world wide web was conceived sometime around my sophomore year of college and birthed into the world not long after my bachelor's degree was printed. Programming manuals were printed on paper and learning new languages involved trips to a bookstore.
Technology progressed and so did resources available to programmers. Technical support, if you could get any, happened by phone over land lines. A few years into my career I had a situation that was causing our whole product to crash. You could call this a roadblock. All signs and Dr. Watson pointed to a Microsoft DLL. Two weeks and several dozen phone calls later, I was several layers deep, they found the problem for me. There was a bug in the DLL exit code when the last instance was removed. The solution was to load one such instance upfront and never close it, thus stepping into the gap between our users and the blue screen of death.
Fast forward a several years and the rarity of such issues increased to the point that most developers couldn't conceive of a problem that obscure. StackOverflow is our gold standard. Reddit steps in when you just need to talk about programming oddities. There are hundreds upon thousands of other sites that we lean onto. Search engines have it all grappled down for us so that we can find the answers we need quickly. The issue now is knowing the questions to ask to guide yourself through the multitude of forks in the road.