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Comment by jimt1234 | Hacker News Reader

One thing I recall from learning C64 BASIC when I was in 6th grade was that, back then, any sort of documentation was difficult to get your hands on. I was given one BASIC programming book as a birthday gift, and it was made clear to me that was all I was gonna get. Technical books were expensive back then, at least for my family they were.

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That it why it was so much a joy to buy magazines. Those magazines with their program listings, the adds, the letters. I remember to this day when I was with my girlfriend for a long time typing long listing of POKEs to hear music from the magnificent SID.

Not sure why, but I didn't really know about the magazines back then. All my knowledge came from friends and reverse-engineering others' code (de-blitz!)

It was, but if you could start building a collection, it didn't take that much to basically have documentation for Everything. All the ROM routines, timings, pin diagrams, BASIC features, etc, etc. Maybe a dozen books, maybe even half that? I don't remember. But at some point you pretty much had everything you'd ever possibly want to know. That was really the last computer I ever had that feeling with. Everything since is just layers and layers of complexity that changes faster than you'll ever get a handle on it and truly understand the whole machine inside out.

Some of my first programming experience was on a TI-84. I didn't have any documentation for it, so I spent hours looking at the function listing and guessing what arguments that function might take. It worked, I was able to write the programs I wanted.

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