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Comment by mouldysammich | Hacker News Reader

I really liked this story. Im much too young to have been around for it, but I feel like this era of computing must have been kind of magical where there was a lot of access and no walled garden nearly to the scale of a google or apple where the obfuscation just requires a flipped bit.

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I'm old enough that my heart fluttered when he mentioned the "ELF II" development board! That's some serious old school magical stuff. That used car salesman was incredibly lucky to snag such a hacker, who had no fear of jumping into hex dumps and flipping bits around, for solving problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELF_II

The RCA 1802 processor even had "SEX" and "GET HIGH" instructions!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_1802

https://www.atarimagazines.com/computeii/issue3/page52.php

Some things were also pretty hard back then (a few years later but still). When you were too young for university and your environment was not academic, getting access to information was so difficult. I remember when we made a school trip to London and I spent all my savings for programming and computer graphic books. There was no wikipedia, no scihub, no blogs, no Github. New coding or hacking e-zines were treated like gold and sometimes I spent multiple months of my savings to get 1 book!

I think I had to wait about 6 months to rent an HTML4 book from the library.

It was massive. Maybe 6 inches thick. I devoured it, and later bought my own copy.

My computer spoke English. I didn't. I just had some nonsensical (for me) commands memorized. Things were indeed different back then.

Also no scrum!

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