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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.