I worked on VAX in the eighties and took the knowledge from hundreds of the famous VAX manuals. They must have cleared whole forests for these manuals. Tons of paper that filled all the walls and rooms. And of course a lot of paper books.

And the keyboards were big and loud. And there were only a few lines on the terminal screen.

And when you printed out a listing, you had to walk a few hundred meters to the data center (called "Rechenzentrum") to pick up the stack of paper at the counter.

Even today, in the age of the WWW, I still have thousands of books as PDF with a local search engine. There is still plenty of (important) information that you can't just access over the Internet.