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Comment by mrwh | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I was ever happier as a programmer than I was in the early 90s, well before university, with no thought of the internet, writing games on my Amiga.

Incidentally, I recently replayed Loom, from a bit before that era. It's still a lovely, wonderful game! Such a shame the fan-made sequel (Forge) seems to have died.

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Same, but it was late 90's and I had found a Quick Basic compiler on our Windows 95 laptop. It had the ability to compile EXEs and I felt like I'd discovered some old magics. Like, this thing was just sitting here? All I had to do was double click qb45.exe?? And it opened a fully integrated terminal IDE???

The built in syntax help, which was incredible, and some example programs (no idea why our laptop had these) let me self-teach.

Now I sit all day and write bare metal firmware, but it feels so empty.

Loom is the best looking EGA game ever made. Sadly the VGA remake was hit-and-miss with the visuals.

Impossible to think about Loom without thinking about the first room in Money Island and the guy with the badge

"Talk to me about Loom!" That was my introduction to it.

I believe it was reasonably popular back in the day, made money at least. Now it would be almost avant guarde in its slowness I guess. You can't even double click to run. The popular art of yesteryear becomes the high art of today...

I had two faster (Pentium 3) machines but firing up my dad's old Pentium 90 running redhat that I installed to use KDE to write C was just a beautiful feeling and really got me coding for a few years.

Even games were at least partially open (quake) or easily moddable (command and conquer, tribes, etc.) so I went down that rabbit hole soon after.

Also man I really miss BeOS.

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