Hmmm, it’s actually hard for me to think about… I started programming in an assembly add-in cartridge on a Commodore Vic20, the reference manual was a goldmine of info (that’s something that is sorely lacking in many languages nowadays), eventually went to an IBM 8088 (still have both these machines in my closet) with basic and so forth (the old ones, literally ‘basic’ and advanced basic, this was long before things even like quickbasic) but quickly got various borland tools like turbo pascel and turbo C, I mostly did C until I got a borland C++ compiler, then eventually some ancient visual studio for C++ and was just C++ for a long long time, eventually dabbled in other languages when the Internet came to exist for the public (this was about 2003-2004) and figured out I could learn interesting things from them that helped in my C++ work, so I tried to consume and learn as many as I could, eventually going to my current tactic of trying to “Get Good” with at least 3 languages a year that I still do to this day.
So back then the major disadvantages would probably have been a lack of examples (no internet, and the local BBS’s weren’t exactly flush with code) although the examples I did have were absolutely top notch in quality. Another thing would be a lack of community to discuss it in.
Too much information of way too low quality is the biggest thing, I am really not a fan of sites like Stack Overflow, all that work should have gone into writing better documentation, not in making a really questionable site of often really poor quality code that people tend to copy and paste without gaining understanding.