Learning how to program in Oman in the 90’s
vivin.net
vivin.net
Most of what I learned was on a C64, initially basic but very quickly switched to assembly.
Coding involved waiting for 1-2 month old magazines arriving and painstakingly typing in all the code to eventually end up with a snake game or similar.
In terms of actual games, there were two avenues:
- Mail order from the UK (takes roughly 2-3 months for it to be shipped and arrive). I still very fondly remember the rush of adrenalin when my dad would say 'there's mail for you'.
- There was a Chinese antiques shop in Ruwi that had a back room with some Chinese enthusiast computing guy who sold games. He eventually got me hooked onto PCs (showed me a mindblowing 286 with CGA graphics which I graduated to after my C64, my parents refused to buy me an Amiga as they thought I'd just use it for gaming).
I ended up becoming quite good at cracking software protection (pretty easy when all you had to do is look through 64kb of ram, you could literally read the whole thing in a few hours), and setting up a dodgy business selling games to everyone at school.
I always felt very out of place though as few people shared the passion I had for this stuff. Moving to the UK after high school for A levels/university and discovering like minded people on BBSs and then the internet in the early 90's was pretty life changing. Suddenly I was not alone, it turns out there's a huge swathe of people that have the exact same passions!
I hear this a lot in retrospectives but was this really that challenging? I remember using DOS when I was in grade 3 (7-8 yrs old) and being able to easily navigate around the primitive computer that was at my moms house most of the week, while using windows 95 at my dads on weekends.
I remember learning to type `help` and running the various commands that appeared with trial/error as an enjoyable experience, not one that was intimidating. And I wasn't a particularly precocious kid, my nerd-dom was late blooming.
I actually found it made me want to explore the depths of the computer more than Windows 95 where I would mostly just click the Doom icon and maybe tinker around with creating a few briefcase folders (which I only just learned the functionality of recently :P).
Good memories in the article, interesting how people went through the same stuff around the world
Lucky. I unfortunately picked up a C++ book from the library as my first coding book around that same age and was intimidated away from programming for a few yrs until high school. I wished I grabbed the BASIC book instead, which would have been far more accessible, but I had read somewhere that video games were made in C++ which led me astray.
What was more challenging in my opinion/experience wasn't the technical aspect; it was the social/human aspect. I live in Algeria and I had a computer since age 4 and started BASIC at 9 and all is good, but there was no Homebrew Computer Club. We were among the first in the country to get a machine like that (it cost the same as a piece of land).
Granted, we also didn't have internet in 91 and the country was in a bloody civil war where you're happy when "only" 10 people get decapitated a day, people waiting in line to get groceries hoping to get home before curfew, and children being taught tradecraft.. but for someone my age, humans would have been more useful.
It's the microcosm/scene/culture that was lacking the most. People to live your interest with, to show your programs to, to learn from. The encouragement of knowing there even exists a scence/culture where that stuff is cool instead of asking myself why on earth I, as a non English speaker in a non English speaking country, am looking up every word in a function description in the dictionary to make sense out of it. Doing that stuff at that age in a computer desert instead of being among your peers was more challenging than any technical difficulties.
Probably pretty trivial in reality, but I was very proud of it at the time. :)
I guess what I remember around that age was using various games' bootdisk utilities to generate disks, then looking at the contents, blindly fooling around with different combinations of settings to get my games working by trial and error. Navigation was pretty easy, but getting memory-constrained things working without some key concepts (x86 real mode memory, stack sizes, file handles, etc) was a challenge.
I think the "help" command was added in MS-DOS 5.0, and I know that I at least started using DOS before then.
I assume you grew up in an english speaking country.
The submitted article is about Oman in Arabia. And for me too as a German 7-8 year old kid the command line help page was inscrutable black magic incantations in latin.
The jump from QBasic to Quick Basic and understanding .EXEs, compilation etc was the turning point for me in understanding programming, debugging and operating systems.
Your note on the shady stores reminds me of doing the same - in the pre-internet/warez era, the only place to get software in the Gulf was in shady malls selling floppies (and later CDs) chock full with pirated software for 10 riyals/dirhams
> This hits close to home.
That's hilarious. I remember I was pissed off: why certain files do stuff and are games and all. How do they do that!
So I created a new .TXT file and changed its extension to .COM and tried to execute it. Then to .EXE.
It didn't work. I don't know what I expected back then, for it to magically do something cool I suppose.
The executables came when I got Visual BASIC for DOS. Wow! You could also make forms with buttons!
It was in on a CD that had a bunch of software on it that came with .NFO files I'd read and wonder "what was that BBS stuff they were talking about. They seem to get together and have fun with computers". They were crews who crack stuff.
My interest in computers only resurfaced around 5-6 years later, complete with Geocities and Xoom experiments! How I wish I could find those first sites I made using Frontpage and copying HTML from other sites.
That was a nice read!