alt Hacker NewsOh man, the nostalgia of buying magazines that came with shareware CDs (we didn't have the internet back then where I lived) and going to a net cafe for half an hour to download cracks, because we obviously didn't have any way to either procure or send USD half way around the world...
It was a magical time mostly because computers were full of possibilities. Someone gave me a CD with Visual Basic 4 and I figured out programming just from reading the help files. I still have no idea how I managed to stumble my way through to actually making real programs.
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Funny to think how useful help files and manuals used to be! I learned QBasic mostly from the builtin help system, VBasic mostly from clicking around, and even DirectX from the help files and tutorials. Nowadays documentation is outsourced to the community it seems, for the most part.
It really was magical. It felt like the wild west. I used to buy a copy of 2600 and sit in a cafe reading it just feeling like I could do anything or go anywhere, which I guess I could to a degree back in those days.
I left my system administration position in the 2010s because it brought back none of anything remotely close to those vibes. Staring at a cloud admin panel in a website all day made me start to hate computers. It was then I realized it was always just going to be a hobby if I wanted to keep it the way I remembered. Fine by me