[1] "What the hell did people do at work all day before the Internet?"

Just in case you wanted a serious answer to your question... in the engineering profession we spent a whole lot of time looking for information. Including:

• Finding books/manuals with the right formulas, then looking up the formulas in the book
• Finding data, eg. "latent heat of evaporation of methanol"
• Finding installation/operation/maintenance manuals. We had a massive library full of manuals.

In many cases, the right resource was not on hand, and you'd have to find the person who had it or knew where to find it. Many times this had to be done via correspondence (fax by then, thank god, not postal mail)

Worst of all, many times you just had to generate the data yourself, by experimentation. This included things like actually measuring the latent heat of evaporation, for example, or trial-and-error wrt eg. disassembly or maintenance procedures. Often "stuff" was designed far more conservatively, to compensate for lack of data.

The internet has been a stupendous boon to engineering productivity, and largely generated the free time that some people spend now on Facebook etc.