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Comment by wetmore | Hacker News Reader

The flip side is that anyone who wants to become a programmer has a wealth of learning resources available to them that did not exist for earlier generations.

I had to spend hours scouring forums to piece together information that is available as a youtube video these days.

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Not only that, but you have access to cheap powerful home machines with the ability to run virtual machines to tinker on.

In the past a lot of the appeal for hacking was to just get exposure to exotic machines, whereas now you can run the same stuff everyone else does locally.

You were lucky to have forums. An older generation had to resort to books and magazines :-)

Nothing beats manually copying hundreds of lines of b&w code from a book and missing some syntax and having no idea why.

Actually, punch cards beat this.

> Nothing beats manually copying hundreds of lines of b&w code from a book and missing some syntax and having no idea why.

That's why Neil J. Rubenking's and Jim Seymour's stuff in PC Magazine had checksums at the end of each line you typed in. Those were the days.

You were lucky if you didn't have to learn a whole 'nother language first too, just saying. :-)

I had the worst of both worlds in the late 2000s when I was trying to learn on my own.

There were printed books where the code didn't work. There were also message board posts that described my exact problem. The only response would be from the OP himself, usually a "never mind, figured it out" thing, with no further details given.

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