At least there were BBS's and magazines back then for some lucky people, especially in the US I guess. In the beginning of the 80s I had 1 book (it came with th

At least there were BBS's and magazines back then for some lucky people, especially in the US I guess. In the beginning of the 80s I had 1 book (it came with the computer) and just the help of some friendly older hackers at a 'local' (fair bit away; my parents had to drive me) event. There were no magazines in any local shops yet, books were expensive and mostly not geared towards learning and they were in English (not my native language; although I am sure I aced English on my final highschool exam because of reading mostly English day in day out). The first years I had to learn like this and from experimentation. After a while I had 'viditel'[0], which allowed downloading short programs and games which I could study. I remember spending weekends just changing the source code until I understood what it did; this was especially painful with poke/peek; trying to figure our what addresses did what was painful without help as exploring would more often than not hang the computer. The advantage was; when you knew things, you were sure they would not be different next year (or 20 years later for that matter) on that computer. So once you got the hang of things, you basically could do them 'forever' (the IBM PC was there but it was garbage compared to some of the homecomputers and as a kid I couldn't see that ever taking off :). Very different from now. It was not really possible to 'update' the OS (although I still have my eprom writer from that time and it still works, so I could definitely install new hacked versions of basic, but that was a lot later). When the BBSs became normal here, things started to go a lot quicker. I ran my own one and worked with people to write our own BBS software in turbo pascal. Really quite a shame all the source code of the games, demos and bbs software got lost. I sold my second computer and foolishly sold all tapes + disks with it, also from my first system (which I still have, but without my own software). I didn't care as I was going to upgrade to an Amiga so I did not want that old stuff anymore. [0] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viditel https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viditel