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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

Before StackOverflow? Not too bad. Without internet access, though? Much, much harder, or rather, slower - a similar level of information could be obtained but it took phone calls, bus trips to a reference library, etc. Other than that, you just had to figure everything out yourself from the user manuals and experimentation.

Of course, back then computers were much simpler and user manuals were much more complete and lower level, so this still feasible, where it wouldn't be today.

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What we did here in Poland (Internet became available to the public in 1996 and then expensive) was to check the library and book shops then buy the worthwhile books. And as usual, run through all examples and then modify and extend them for fun and experiment.

The books were of vastly different quality, the food ones always had properly described algorithms in algol or pseudocode of the day. The RAD ones had plenty of screenshots. Also the books came with disks containing the described programs. It was typically some form of BASIC or Pascal.

Advanced Turbo Pascal books had x86 assembly in them. Old advanced C64 BASIC books had 6052 assembly. And sometimes you could get your hands on an Amiga Rexx book or magazine.

From the more advanced books you really learned how dumb the computers are and how they work internally. This is missing nowadays.

There were also pretty decent magazines with ideas and program printouts.

You had to experiment more and rely on the cookbook less.

I disagree computers were much simpler. If you wanted to play games, you had to struggle with IRQ, DMA, extended memory mode, smartdrive, config.sys, autoexec.bat, commandline ARJ, zip, rar, floppies or tapes, and so on. If you had Linux, you also had to regularly recompile kernel to make something work (for example a device driver).

My pet hypothesis is that puzzle and turn-based strategy games were much more popular back then because average computer user was much nerdier. Age of Wonders III came out in recent years, and while it has very good production qualities and is a much more advanced strategy than Heroes of Might and Magic or first Civilization games, it never reached its popularity.

But back to programming. Monthly magazines were BIG before internet, and some of them taught programming. For example there would be a game or another interactive program written in BASIC in every issue. When you had the entire source code printed in front of you, it was fairly easy to tinker with it to grant extra lives, etc.

Computer interfaces were lower level, and less friendly. Computers themselves are now mindbogglingly more complex than they were back then (and a good deal of that complexity goes towards making them easier to build and use!)

I agree with your hypothesis about games. If you have to do some study and learn some magic incantations even to launch a game (insert fond memories of himem.sys and boot disks here), then it stands to reason that those of us who could actually get into games were the type of people who liked a bit of an intellectual challenge.

Magazines were a big thing, definitely. I have a big box of Acorn Users somewhere that I inherited from my dad, and at long intervals I pull them out to read through the articles and old BASIC listings. :)

+1 for the magazine mention. A lot of what I learned from tinkering with computers back then came from magazine and the floppies (and later CDs) of shareware they tended to include.

oh yeah, who remembers installing slackware from 14 floppies & praying no kernel panic after recompile. oh and neverending rootshell exploits.

Google was a major step up, even when it had less than a billion pages indexed. I remember trying to find programming information on Alta Vista. It was possible but there was a lot of clicking "next page".

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