
Learning how to program in Oman in the 90’s - vivin
http://vivin.net/2016/07/26/learning-how-to-program-in-oman-in-the-90s/
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hani13
I can one up you. I learned how to program in Oman in the 80's.

Most of what I learned was on a C64, initially basic but very quickly switched
to assembly.

Coding involved waiting for 1-2 month old magazines arriving and painstakingly
typing in all the code to eventually end up with a snake game or similar.

In terms of actual games, there were two avenues:

\- Mail order from the UK (takes roughly 2-3 months for it to be shipped and
arrive). I still very fondly remember the rush of adrenalin when my dad would
say 'there's mail for you'.

\- There was a Chinese antiques shop in Ruwi that had a back room with some
Chinese enthusiast computing guy who sold games. He eventually got me hooked
onto PCs (showed me a mindblowing 286 with CGA graphics which I graduated to
after my C64, my parents refused to buy me an Amiga as they thought I'd just
use it for gaming).

I ended up becoming quite good at cracking software protection (pretty easy
when all you had to do is look through 64kb of ram, you could literally read
the whole thing in a few hours), and setting up a dodgy business selling games
to everyone at school.

I always felt very out of place though as few people shared the passion I had
for this stuff. Moving to the UK after high school for A levels/university and
discovering like minded people on BBSs and then the internet in the early 90's
was pretty life changing. Suddenly I was not alone, it turns out there's a
huge swathe of people that have the exact same passions!

~~~
vivin
It's crazy how much motivation and passion you can get when information is so
scarce, and you just want to play games :D I don't regret what I had to go
through either.

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dmix
> But even that was a non-trivial endeavor in those days. You couldn’t just
> click or touch an icon on the screen to launch the game; you had to use
> command-line.

I hear this a lot in retrospectives but was this really that challenging? I
remember using DOS when I was in grade 3 (7-8 yrs old) and being able to
easily navigate around the primitive computer that was at my moms house most
of the week, while using windows 95 at my dads on weekends.

I remember learning to type `help` and running the various commands that
appeared with trial/error as an enjoyable experience, not one that was
intimidating. And I wasn't a particularly precocious kid, my nerd-dom was late
blooming.

I actually found it made me want to explore the depths of the computer more
than Windows 95 where I would mostly just click the Doom icon and maybe tinker
around with creating a few briefcase folders (which I only just learned the
functionality of recently :P).

~~~
dharma1
Same, I learned DOS, BASIC and a bit of asm when I was 9 or 10 (late 80s),
from a single book and mucking about. So did a lot of my friends. Kids learn
pretty quick.

Good memories in the article, interesting how people went through the same
stuff around the world

~~~
dmix
> BASIC and a bit of asm

Lucky. I unfortunately picked up a C++ book from the library as my first
coding book around that same age and was intimidated away from programming for
a few yrs until high school. I wished I grabbed the BASIC book instead, which
would have been far more accessible, but I had read somewhere that video games
were made in C++ which led me astray.

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2pointsomone
Hey Vivin! Great to see this. Also grew up in Oman (went to ISM). Good old
days! Times when the only games you could get were from some shady stores in
Ruwi or in CCC or Al-Harthy Complex. So so nice to see all the hacks you were
up to be able to play cool games.

~~~
umeshunni
This hits close to home. I grew up in Saudi in the 90s and had a very similar
experience - stared out on an Atari 65XE, moved on to a 486 with QBasic, then
QuickBasic, Turbo Pascal and later Visual Basic and VC++ (with a detour to
Borland C++).

The jump from QBasic to Quick Basic and understanding .EXEs, compilation etc
was the turning point for me in understanding programming, debugging and
operating systems.

Your note on the shady stores reminds me of doing the same - in the pre-
internet/warez era, the only place to get software in the Gulf was in shady
malls selling floppies (and later CDs) chock full with pirated software for 10
riyals/dirhams

~~~
Jugurtha
>The jump from QBasic to Quick Basic and understanding .EXEs, compilation etc
was the turning point for me in understanding programming, debugging and
operating systems.

That's hilarious. I remember I was pissed off: why certain files do stuff and
are games and all. How do they do that!

So I created a new .TXT file and changed its extension to .COM and tried to
execute it. Then to .EXE.

It didn't work. I don't know what I expected back then, for it to magically do
something cool I suppose.

The executables came when I got Visual BASIC for DOS. Wow! You could also make
forms with buttons!

It was in on a CD that had a bunch of software on it that came with .NFO files
I'd read and wonder "what was that BBS stuff they were talking about. They
seem to get together and have fun with computers". They were crews who crack
stuff.

~~~
vivin
Oh, wow! I did the exact same thing! I remember thinking why some files would
just "run" from the command-line and why others wouldn't! I remember renaming
a .TXT file to .COM or .EXE and also wondering why it wouldn't run!

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rafaelm
Hah I think we must have had the same Logo teacher. I vividly remember him
telling us that the computer is stupid and that it would only do what we told
it to. I must have been around 8 years old, late 80's I think.

My interest in computers only resurfaced around 5-6 years later, complete with
Geocities and Xoom experiments! How I wish I could find those first sites I
made using Frontpage and copying HTML from other sites.

That was a nice read!

~~~
Retra
I read once that computers are like magic genies: they will grant your every
wish, so long as you are able to carefully articulate what you want in such
detail and with so little ambiguity that they cannot possibly misinterpret
what you wish for.

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reachtarunhere
Sometimes the lack of resources makes life simple and fun. I miss the feeling
of doing things aimlessly just for the sake of doing them. Not for some reward
or even the perceived value of what the task is. Nostalgia is the word that
best describes this post :)

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protomyth
For the slighter earlier Late 70's & 80's era, I think the magazines provided
the most information on programming. I think I bought one book, but spent a
lot of time typing in programs from magazines and learning how it all worked.

