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Comment by eddieroger | Hacker News Reader

Same. I'm sitting here nostalgic for the days when I'd stay up late on my parents' computer talking to God knows who on AOL, reading about black boxes and phreaking in very vanilla sources, and learning how to write progs in VB back in the day. Oh the excitement when I got in the Winsock beta and now my whole OS had Internet connectivity. It was great times.

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VB progz are literally at the root of the origin story behind I'm even here, now, writing this comment on this website. Seriously changed my life by compelling me to find an answer to the question "how did they build this?", which led me to coding. 25 years later and here I am.

Same. It took me years to even figure out I could just buy programming books from the store. But progs like Magenta and AOHell, plus the F1 help/documentation built into vb and the like, set me on the path.

> AOHell

Early gateway drug for me too.

There's dozens of us!

Here's an old thread some of you guys might have missed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31001916

> “how did they build this?”

I feel like this is the absolute distilled essence of this site and its visitors.

Dan Applemans guide to the Win32 API and some bas files really kickstarted things. {S /con/con. I think I’ve still got ancient copies around here. Time to browse lenshellprogarchive.com.

Me too! It was aol punters and vb proggies that were my first push into programming and here I am all these years later.

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