internet access is a massive distraction, instead you used documentation that was pretty good. It meant you needed a bit more of a base in place before you started--you had to buy a copy of the developer SDK/tookkit for whatever you were working on--but you had so many fewer distractions after that.

(not that it played a large role, but inter network communications between companies was pretty standard during the time that Microsoft was writing Windows, starting with microsoft!ucbvax!decvax etc. type addressing, and soon .com/.edu was added)