It was different. The amount of resources were zero. We had books. Like real thick books with lengthy explanations of each command. Sometimes it was the complet

It was different. The amount of resources were zero. We had books. Like real thick books with lengthy explanations of each command. Sometimes it was the complete opposite and there was a command without any explanation at all. Good look with that, without decent debuggers or clear error messages. Since my 14th I joined a computer club. Basically a bunch of nerds from the age 14-60 working with computers 24/7. Some ran Unix like systems, most had a Windows system or RedHat. You had to take your desktop computer and (huge) monitor with you to every meeting. It was a whole operation just to get there. Some guys worked at Philips (now ASML) and had very early version of COAX nic's. We built our own LAN networks and shared files over the network. We played with network settings, which was basically what we did all day. Lots of terminals and Dos screens. Later Netscape was the browser of choice. When the Windows era really took off some of us started to hack Windows 95 machines. Often with the use of telnet and a bunch of commands you were able to find a lot of information about a computer. Sometimes it was just as easy as sending a picture with a hidden backdoor with tools like Cult Dead Cow. We did it for fun. There was no scamming involved. We used ICQ and IRC to communicate online. Later there was MSN Messenger which was great to communicate with classmates. There was no cable internet. You had to pay per minute for internet over the telephone line. Free software was available on Warez sites or FTP sites. Also newsgroups but this was mostly for reading news. I had FTP servers running everywhere. People connected to them through the whole world. Some left a thank you note after downloading music or the newest Winamp version. There was no Napster. We went to LAN parties. Basically a university opening their auditorium for 150 nerds with huge desktop machines drinking Jolt coke all night. Some companies sponsored the events and tried to recruit java developers. There were games to hack a computer. Big part always was the opening where the (hack) groups presented themselves with 3d movies. The quality was insane for the time. Also during Windows 95 lots of software ran in a DOS prompt. BASIC and Pascal were languages often used for this. The applications were not structured in a great way. You had open each file and analyze it. I can't remember developers used many comments in the code. Files were fairly easy to read and understand. There weren't that many references to other files. If you wanted to have a DOS prompt with your application you had to write everything, even the mouse cursor moving over the screen. There were no packages or other predefined codelines. There was no autocomplete, code checks, stack overflow, or decent debugger. There was even a time without line numbers.