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Comment by zmb_ | Hacker News Reader

It was a life-defining piece of software for me too. As a teenager I found a server called “REALbasic Cafe” that inspired and helped me go from knowing next to nothing about programming to making my first money from shareware as a high school kid.

To this day I’m grateful I stumbled across the Hotline software and the server.

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The REALbasic Cafe was huge for me, too. It was an amazingly positive community and I met so many awesome people. One of them sent me a link to this post! It's awesome to see other people still remember it, too.

I had an identical experience with the REALbasic Cafe as a kid, down to eventually selling a couple of shareware projects. I wonder if we were there at the same time.

The Café was my second home as a rural teenager into Macs and programming at a time when no other kids were. The 90s being what they were, my mom even let me fly solo to meet other Café members at the old MacHack conferences (in Dearborn, Michigan!).

I have nothing but fond memories of the 90s Mac community. It really was a special time and place. I hope my kids find their equivalent of these spaces.

Spent a ton of time on Hotline servers in the 90s. I wonder if any of them still exist. I'd dearly love to be able to pop back into my teen self and mess around on one.

Me too! I learn so much about coding from that server in high school, it was definitely a formative experience, learning to code with other teens all over the country.

I hung out there as well but I found REALbasic hard to understand at a young age. It just didn't align with my mental model. Later, I discovered Ruby and had great success.

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