walterra

Once upon a time, software wasn’t distributed on data cassettes or floppies (and don’t you dare think of a CD-ROM). Nope, you had to type the whole program yourself to run it. This is how I learned BASIC.

A recent posting on Hacker News about A first-person engine in 265 lines in JavaScript reminded me of a „vintage“ developer book resting in one of me shelves: PC UNDERGROUND. The story of how I got my hands on it is at least somewhat noteworthy.

As far as I can remember, the book was quickly out of print. This was of course at a time before Ebay and „PDF-torrents“. I was eager to get the book but thought I was out of luck. One day I went to Kufstein to a computer related second hand store to sell of some stuff (among other things my „Fast Movie Machine“, don’t ask me what rid me to sell off that gem).

Thing was, that store was a weird mix of a porn video rental and a computer store. I swear I went there for the PC gear :). So there it was, standing in a shelf between the latest 90ies porn: PC UNDERGROUND. Guess it’s kind of sign that you’re a nerd if you go to a porn shop to buy a book about learning on how to program.