I can reply because I was in the same situation at a younger age, at a time with no internet then limited internet. Raw curiosity & having "just access to the

I can reply because I was in the same situation at a younger age, at a time with no internet then limited internet. Raw curiosity & having "just access to the required hardware" (a huge "just") and a bit of books & magazines can take you a long way. My parents were not programmers but my father bought computers early on (1984), and later brought compilers at home (via his work), e.g. TurboPascal, C++, and let me experiment. I learned mostly via magazines & books, and later a bit of exchanges with peers (demomaking), and also via buying disks (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/DP_Tool_Club https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/DP_Tool_Club) that contained documentation (such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralf_Brown%27s_Interrupt_List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralf_Brown%27s_Interrupt_List) and arrived via snail mail. I "just" gradually iterated and coded small stuff, then gradually more complicated stuff (Windowing toolkit in CGA, a Tetris clone, a Bomberman clone, FFT software, and ultimately 3D realtime rendering without any FPU, only in software, with Phong rendering and such https://github.com/thbar/demomaking#obez-1995 https://github.com/thbar/demomaking#obez-1995). I was not an isolated case in the sense I ended up stumbling on other teenagers (via the demomaking world) who did exactly the same thing. Today a curious kid can go probably much further, as long as curiosity is encouraged :-)