I can relate too, though my situation was also not that bad. Too poor to buy a computer, learned programming (BASIC mostly for the C64) from library books, and

I can relate too, though my situation was also not that bad. Too poor to buy a computer, learned programming (BASIC mostly for the C64) from library books, and electronics from library books, and general details about PC hardware from magazines. This all without having a computer. Then I managed to repair and salvage enough old PC parts to piece together my first 8086 PC, eventually upgraded to a 286. We were long distance calls away from any city so dial up connections were impossibly expensive, so I learned to hack my way around some online services and phone phreaking to get myself onto the internet in 1993. I then got hooked on Unix and the internet and it became my ticket out of our in the middle of nowhere town all the way to living in the developed world.