The StuffIt I remember was created by high school student Raymond Lau — apparently in 1987 (37 years ago) according to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StuffIt
Always blew my mind that a "kid" wrote this app.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StuffIt
Always blew my mind that a "kid" wrote this app.
Some people just exceed our expectations. I can't achieve at that level, but I'm happy to cheer for those who can.
I started coding when I was a kid. I didn't have to seek permission from anyone, my parents didn't even know. I didn't have to obtain a license. There was no surprised clerk wondering what that kid is doing on their website, like there would have been in a physical establishment I'd need to visit for any other hobby. There was an over-13 restriction on most websites in theory (seriously, fuck COPPA), but we all knew that we should never give out our real date of birth on the internet to avoid trouble. The only places that were unavailable to me were those requiring a credit card, so a VPS was out of the question, but you could do just fine if all you had was free resources.
Mathematics is an oddball since you could study it purely with books, pencils, and paper. Programming does have an entry fee to practice, but computers became very cheap very fast in the early 1980's. By the early 1990's you could get somebody else's castoff hardware for free. By the early 2000's you could get practically any type of development tool you wanted for free. There are also plenty of stories of enthusiatic and creative people finding ways to access computers for as long as time sharing systems existed. Even if you were relatively isolated geographically and had to spend your own money on a computer, the only real cost was the initial outlay and that expense could keep someone occupied for years. (For the most part, people didn't subscribe to software or online services back then.)
Social factors also enter the picture. A kid exploring chemical reactions or disecting small animals is going to be looked upon very differently from one spending half of their waking hours programming computers. For the most part, there is nothing illegal with any of those activities. It is just that the first two usually brought to mind potentially immorall or potentially illegal activities, while the latter was viewed as harmless at worse.
#-- TMON was written by Waldemar Horwat. It was almost always used with an optional add-on, called a User Area, that was written by Darin Adler. Both of them were just kids at the time they worked on TMON. Darin Adler was a college student, and Waldemar Horwat had not yet finished high school. According to Darin Adler’s account, Horwat wrote the entire thing (in assembly language), before ever trying to assemble it.
He was also a big Ddial user.