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Comment by threeio | Hacker News Reader

Is it bad that I knew that one without opening it? ... never mind I'll be over yelling at these young kids to get off my lawn :)

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Troubleshooting was different when we came up. Just your wits and maybe some gurus you could call on a landline as backup. No fancy internet with tons of answers of varying degrees of usefulness.

You might have forgotten them, but there were also books printed on paper.

H4x0r doesn't need book. H4x0r try 4nd err0r.

Books were just knowledge. Debugging was skill. At certain point in knowledge-gain, you develop a good skill and after that point, you don't need books anymore. Maybe from time to time. I still have a suse6 printed manual.. I can't see it in the cellar, but It've been HUUGE

But you still need some critical amount of knowledge that you need from somewhere. I wish I at least knew there exists something like assembler when I was 12. I naively tried to make some demos, but basic was not adequate, so I considered demoscene as "magic".

This is just macho bravado, and it can be fun, but definitely not the most efficient use of time for someone.

If you have access, why would you debug machine code without using the reference manuals for a particular processor and OS and whatever else you're dealing with? You could spend hours chasing a "impossible" problem that could be easily be found in the errata for a giving stepping.

As long as you had access to a library... When I was 14 or so, I used the MS-DOS DEBUG program to run step-by-step an executable that did something to change blinking to high-intensity background in text mode. After one hour or so I found the magic BIOS call... which of course was documented in the technical manual I found in the library one year later (because new school = new library with more books).

When I was a kid I used to have this Charles Petzold book that I learned this stuff from, it was basically my Bible. I don't have it anymore, I wish I could remember what it was. People recommend Code a lot, but I don't think that was it.

Edit: it wasn't Charles Petzold at all, it was DOS Power Tools by Paul Somerson

FidoNet and WWIVNet were also pretty good places to find people to ask questions.

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