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Comment by cpach | Hacker News Reader

It was! :) But things are mostly better now. One striking difference is that in the PC world back then, getting a sane programming environment was quite hard if you didn’t have someone to show you how to do it. Many compilers/IDEs were commercial and too expensive for kids who just wanted to try out programming. I had a PC but I had no idea that Perl, Python or Scheme/Common Lisp even existed.

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Many compilers/IDEs were commercial and too expensive for kids who just wanted to try out programming

This is true, but on the other hand, every installation of MS-DOS came with some version of BASIC, so there was really no friction, just type QBASIC and you're immediately in really quite a good IDE with excellent on-line help.

I had that exact experience. I was playing Half-Life (1998) and I learned that you could download the source and modify it (I was not a programmer, just some little kid with a computer). I somehow figured out how to download a free/trial of Borland C++, setup my dev environment, and recompile the entirety of the source code after making a one-character change (changed the friendtype of grunts from one integer value to another) so that they would treat the player as "friendly" and focus on shooting aliens instead. It was a very painful process.

This was before Half-Life: Opposing Force was released.

I had a spectrum, and found a comic shop that had old 80s computer magazines that taught assembler. I also found a z80 compiler via obscure pen pals via small ads in the games magazines. Edge of the seat stuff, but the feeling of accomplishment was astonishing when you actually did something. I think the bar is so high for bedroom coders these days and they're always getting weird drag n drop languages pushed at them, which just stifles creativity (imho).

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