I went to my local home computer club when I was around 12 to soak up information beginning of the 80s; there were all these guys (only guys) there much older t

I went to my local home computer club when I was around 12 to soak up information beginning of the 80s; there were all these guys (only guys) there much older than me who knew everything and liked helping a kid who, by then, knew how to program basic, asm + pascal. They taught me eprom programming so I could swap out the basic rom, programming BBS software (I wrote a few BBS systems for myself after that; I had hosted a BBS since age 10 and it was always cool to have different features etc than the rest) and making cartridges for all kinds of purpose. Before that I got most from magazines & books; my grandparents took me to fire sales (lot of magazines there) and 'rubbish sellers' (not sure of the english word), for instance, Phillips had a quarterly 'dump' sale under the football stadium; all kinds of electronics, books etc could be had there for next to nothing (money earned with strawberry picking in the summer went to those places). I bought scopes, ham radios etc and documentation there. And my father got me books that were damaged from work (mostly C, Pascal, later Clipper and other things).