Comment by jimmux | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimmux | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who was messing around with computers back then, I'm jealous of kids who are getting serious about this stuff now.

I was lucky to have a computer at all to learn on. If I did anything remotely hacky, I would be warned about breaking an expensive and irreplaceable piece of equipment.

There was no help or documentation. No Internet to download the most basic of resources. If I didn't stumble upon HyperCard at 12 years old and figure out what it was through trial and error, I may never have got the spark of curiosity that put me on the path.

Some of the projects that exist now would have blown my little mind back then. People are reverse engineering my favourite old games and making them better! Insanity! And free 3D game engines!

Using a nicely configured IDE with autocomplete, format on save, linting, etc. allows the mind be so liberated from the tedious details and really focus on the actual problem. You can actually do interesting things in JavaScript. It's a world apart from when typing <blink> tags into Notepad was enough to impress your friends.

Completely agree. Kids these days ... :)

I had my own Windows 95 PC (120 MHz Packard Bell) that I saved up lawn money for (my dad agreed to pay 50% for my first computer). I wanted to learn programming, but found the C and C++ books my parents bought me to be really dense. So I taught myself QBasic (and TI Basic on my TI-83). If I had had anything like the youtube videos, online tutorials, blogs, Stack Overflow, etc. that modern folks have, high school would have been completely different.

I have a friend who taught himself the DOS prompt on his parents' computer when he was in early high school. He had no access to any materials (this was before the internet was available); he literally typed every possible combination of letters and discovered the commands (dir, cls, move, del, ren, etc.) and tried to infer what they did.

I remember my dad being fed up with me asking "hey dad, can I play Woffenstone?" (yes, I pronounced it like that since I was a 11 year old kid from sweden back then) so he gave me the DOS 5.0 manual and said "here you go kiddo, you can play as much as you want when you've learned how to start the game by yourself).

That's where it all started for me and I was always on the computer whenever I could until my dad got fed up with me installing games and uninstalling his stuff so he password locked it in the BIOS.

So I had to figure out how to bypass the BIOS password which I eventually did by just guessing the password. Now I could play games and mess around on the computer whenever he wasn't at home but I had to hide all my games so that he didn't realize that I was using the computer whenever he wasn't at home. Eventually he did realize that so he changed the password and uninstalled all my games so once again I had to guess the password and this time I put my own BIOS password on it and all hell broke loose.

And that's where the hacker mentality started and sooner than later my dad bought a new computer and gave the old one to me.

Good times.

Great story, thanks for sharing :)

There was a Windows for Workgroups computer lab at my high school. They had a DOS-based login, but accessing the DOS prompt from Windows was disabled. At one point, someone figured out that the login screen could be bypassed by pressing Ctrl+Break; the teacher found out and disabled that particular keystroke. But after hours of experimenting, I figured out that Alt+3 sends an ASCII character (0x3) that has the same effect. So we were back to playing games in the lab after hours -- they were often hidden in a folder named Alt+255 which looked like a space in DOS but was invisible to the File Manager in Windows. Good times :)

That also reminds me of when I regularly used to visit our local library after school (junior in high school at that time) which had these job terminals (win95 boxes connected to the internet through a fiber connection) for people to use when looking for jobs.

Apparently they disabled basically all keystrokes while the application ran so we could only use a trackball to navigate the job board web site and print.

I never figured out how to just enable keystrokes again so I just unplugged the power cord, booted up in safe mode and edited autoexec.bat and uncommented the line for the application to autorun on windows boot up and rebooted. Free fiber internet and a lot of IRC for weeks to come!

However one of the librarians came up to me one day and asked "aren't you a little too young to be looking for a job?" and I was just joking and replied "yeah well, it's rough times you know". She looked concern and then looked at the screen and said something like "What's your name? I don't think you're allowed to do that... I'm going to have to tell you to get up and leave now".

I was indefinitely banned from using the computers and job terminals.

> There was no help or documentation. No Internet to download the most basic of resources.

I remember my grandparents had internet before we did at home so I had to cycle to their house and print out documentation to bring home and continue working.

Emacs existed back then, and it auto formatted on save.

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