
“Was isolated from 1999 to 2006 with a 486. Built my own late 80s OS” - shalmanese
http://imgur.com/gallery/hRf2trV
======
stuff4ben
I had a similar although not as tragic story of my own. My parents were poor
(dad was in the USAF) so we couldn't get a Commodore 64 or Apply IIe/IIc like
everyone else had. We got a Commodore Plus/4 because they were literally
giving them away. Since I couldn't buy any games for it and there was hardly
any software available, I taught myself BASIC and made my own games. Fast-
forward 30 years (geez I'm getting old) and now I'm fairly successful (in my
own mind) as a software engineer at a Fortune 100 company. I credit being
deprived by my parents for becoming interested in computers like I am today.

~~~
prezjordan
So amazing. I wonder if it's possible to manufacture that sort of limitation
nowadays. Not sure if I would even want to!

~~~
lukaslalinsky
I think the limitations are not main reason why these 8-bit computers produced
many good programmers. It's the fact that they booted straight to BASIC. In
many cases, that was all you had. That invited people to start experimenting.

My parents were also poor, I learned BASIC without having access to a computer
except for one hour a week at school, I didn't have my own computer until many
years later, I was fixing other people's computers to earn money to get
components for my computer, I didn't have access to internet until around
2000, so I was learning from outdated books. I sometimes wonder what would
happen if I didn't have those limitations.

Anyway, Raspberry Pi is definitely the closest thing to the experience now.
You boot up the default image and you have access to a lot of programming
tools. You even get to peek/poke memory to access the GPIO pins, but you have
to do it as root these days. :)

~~~
prezjordan
I like your hypothesis. Maybe I'll campaign to get BASIC material on Khan
Academy ;)

Only semi-kidding.

~~~
empressplay
We're developing a BASIC interpreter called retRUNner that's (initially)
Applesoft compatible, but will have modern graphics and sound capabilities so
users (kids, mostly) will be able to play games like Woz's original Breakout
(we have a collection of over 400 listings we'll be shipping with it) and
upgrade them to 3D, add art, music, sound effects and so on.

So we're teaching a bit of history along with some coding skills. Down the
road we're going to add additional 'dialects' such as Apple LOGO, and Atari,
Sinclair and Commodore BASICs, but the Apple II version will be out soon --
I'll be sure to mention it on here when we release it =)

~~~
mkramlich
for bonus points support all the same PEEKs and POKEs and CALLs that Applesoft
BASIC did on the II series. even if it's not strictly part of the BASIC
itself, but the integration between it and the hardware/BIOS, it would be
nice. technically might be required to correctly run lots of the BASIC
programs from that era. I know most of my own relied on them for certain
effects.

------
phpnode
Something about this story does not sound quite right to me. If I were
essentially locked up in that scenario, I would at _least_ be confident of the
names of the _3_ games which were installed, since they'd inevitably be played
to death, regardless of how good they were. Also there's this
[http://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/2p63rv/australian...](http://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/2p63rv/australian_isolated_from_1999_to_2006_with_a_486/cmtpdr5)

~~~
qnr
Also, "Osborne 486, with about 64k of RAM if memory serves me correctly. "

First, a 486 with 64K RAM is ridiculous as they typically had multiple
megabytes of memory.

Second, he worked with that PC for 7 years and isn't quite confident of how
much memory it had? This doesn't sound quite right either. I can clearly
remember the amounts of RAM my first few PCs had, starting from 1999.

~~~
andsmi2
I don't think these are lies. I think this speaks to the level of technical
understanding by the author. He thought 64k. He was writing everything in
qbasic-- so a spec like that wouldn't matter. These are some good things to
accomplish with basic, but it made sense when you get to the end and
understand he is baffled with an ide. The term dos "clone" is weird--- I think
he meant a sort of shell written in qbasic. This is essentially a "script
kiddy" stuck in the outback. Admirable use of his time. I am scared about the
level of worship the comments on the page provide.

~~~
metric10
I think "script kiddy" is overly harsh. Script kiddies can't program, they
just run other people's "scripts." He clearly had some aptitude, he just
didn't have the books or the right environment to learn what he needed to
truly excel.

------
dpcan
I'd love to go back to those days... 486 with DOS and QBasic, maybe a Borland
C compiler if you're lucky enough to have a local computer store that sold
copies.

Myself and a friend tried to create our own version of Windows 3.1 in QBasic
when we were in middle school. I wish we would have saved our progress. I
don't think it was as far as long as I remember. I know it read INI files, and
we could drag windows around. Not sure how much else.

OP got to learn how to program the fun way, like a lot of us did in the 90's.
Grinding away at crazy side projects on old DOS systems with lots of
limitations. That opportunity just isn't available to kids anymore. High
powered computers are everywhere and accessible, no reason to make an old PC
do new tricks. But I guess they have the web to do crazy things with, so it's
not so bad.

------
wtbob
> I took another shot at coding this year to see if I could build anything
> interesting in C++, but the difference between something like QBASIC and a
> full blown C++ IDE just ended up baffling me more than anything else, and I
> struggled for a bit.

That's a really damning statement about our modern software ecosystem. You see
what this guy was able to put together as a kid, and it's impressive. Sure, it
was close to 20 years out of date, but it was good-looking and (appears)
usable.

Why isn't it as easy for him, with the knowledge he's accumulated, to build
software with modern languages, modern tools and and modern libraries as it
was for him to build software with BASIC?

~~~
semiel
I don't think C++ is anywhere near the state of the art in terms of usability.
I wonder what he would do with something like Python + PyGame.

~~~
pekk
Even if that would offer some usability improvements, we've still lost
something in how quickly you can draw a circle and play a sound. Don't forget
your header files, can you use hardware acceleration?

~~~
bglazer
I evangelize a lot for Processing [1] but it is the best experience I've had
for getting to draw a circle as quickly as possible. It's a limited subset of
Java included in a very basic IDE, that was developed at the MIT Media Lab.
Its original purpose was bringing computation and graphics to artists and
designers.

void setup() { ellipse(10,10,20,20); }

[1] processing.org

------
wslh
i) In 1990 I was using a VAX computer in high school shared by a whole class
and programming in Pascal. The compilation process (executed in a compilation
queue) could take a few minutes or half an hour depending of how many people
and processes were running that day.

I wanted to imitate this stuff in my Amiga 500, so I joined a friend who knew
about electronics and he removed a Commodore 64 keyboard and made the
interface to connect to the Amiga as a second keyboard. I made the software in
assembler to use the same computer with a single monitor in two windows using
two keyboards. A bizarre but funny project.

ii) In 1992 I wanted to make my own graphical operating system. Not in the
real sense but in the Windows 3.0 sense. I started doing this in Turbo Pascal
and at some point I stopped because my multitasking was cooperative just
realizing a few years later that Windows (and Apple!) used this basic strategy
too. I felt ashamed of them.

~~~
stuff4ben
you were spoilt by the Amiga's pre-emptive multitasking. It's funny I recall
"pre-emptive multitasking" being a big selling point of the Amiga's OS, but I
never understood it at the time, I just knew it was better.

~~~
wslh
In which project (i) or (ii) ?

On (i) I took advantage of the preemptive multitasking being able to use the
computer by two people in the same computer monitor.

On (ii) I knew that the Amiga was superior than a PC but I had access to more
documentation and better programming languages (Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++) on
the PC. In the Amiga you ended up doing multimedia stuff with a lot of
hardware information about the coprocessors and DMA while in the PC was more
straightforward.

------
iamcreasy
Astonishing story. I'd like to meed this guy and have a coffee with him.

I have a similar story but not as harsh as his. I started programming
basic(not sure which variant) on a small hand held system CASIO PB700. One
this system I've created a Paranoid clone and a 4 frame ascii animation. My
father saw my aptitude on programming he introduced me to his more advanced
systems. He was a computer engineer and had an habit of buying new systems in
1980s. On the newer systems(I don't recall the name) I learned Turbo Pascel.
Back then those systems didn't have any storage. MSDOS had to be booted from
one 5 inch floppy drive and a new disk had to be inserted to get the different
programs.

Every time you compile and run a program, it would take a couple of minutes to
read the compiler from the 5inch floppy disk. Those floppy disks were fragile
and they had a tendency to developed bad sectors after a frequent read-write
session. To circumvent this, my father deployed a ramdrive on the system. A
drive would be created inside the ram every time the system boots up, and it
would copy the Turbo Pascel compilers and all relevant libraries to that ram
drive. So next time you hit 'run', it would take seconds instead of minutes.
This solutions still blows away my mind.

Another thing about these old machines, they all came with monochrome
monitors. It was all green and had a very low refresh rate. Every time there
was a large change on the display, you could still see the previous characters
being faded away. Like matrix.

Later I had access to better machines(Pentium 1 133Mhz), but haven't forgot
those days. I wish I had more information about those systems to post here,
but I am long way from home. Back at home those systems are still all packed
up and stacked on top on one another. The funny thing - all them work as if
they are 'brand new'.

~~~
orangecomputer
I've finally stumbled upon your post, after reading through all the comments
this has gotten.

They definitely don't build 'em like they used to! The Pentium 1 133mhz system
I used for a while after leaving is still in top notch shape today. I opened
it up last year and there's no dust, rust or corrosion at all (and this is
after it sat in a heavily tropical atmosphere for a few years recently). The
hard disk is in perfect shape too, the whole thing runs like new.

I wonder how well the Osborne 486 would be running if I still had it, or if
someone ever salvaged it out there and is running it today. Kind of a crazy
thought but it's a shame to think that it's very likely become part of a
landfill.

~~~
iamcreasy
Absolutely. I still have my old machines. Some of them may be dusty but all of
them are as clean as new.

I'd happy that you are taking your time to reply to this thread. How are you
doing this days? What are you working on?

------
twoodfin
Nitpick: It's essentially impossible that a 486 would come with 64KB of RAM.
My 8088 XT clone in '88 came with 640KB. 4-16MB would be more common for the
time.

~~~
jschwartzi
Was it a PC-compatible? If so he might have had more memory but been unable to
address it because he was running in Real Mode.

~~~
metric10
I'm not aware of a non-PC compatible that had an 80486. In any event, real
mode can address up to 1MB of memory, with 640KB available to programs. But I
do think you are right. If all he had was DOS and QBASIC, he had no way to go
into protected mode. He probably just dropped the 0 by mistake.

~~~
xorcist
No, he means 64 kB segments, which is what he had to deal with in the menu
based file manager he wrote in QBASIC. That much should be clear if you read
between the lines (the goto based text adventures etc.).

------
lake99
Fascinating story. If it's any consolation to the author, some of us still use
Vi/Emacs, do batch processing in shell scripts, run complicated commands from
the command prompt. And when it's time to take a break for some gaming, launch
NetHack or some other roguelike -- in a terminal.

To hazard a guess, the biggest "wow" programming languages for the author now
would be Python and JavaScript.

------
doctorstupid
I'm saddened that most of the comments here are of the "me too, time for my
story" variety. The amount of self references is disheartening.

~~~
pekk
I'm saddened that you're saddened by nerds relating to each other, talking
about things they actually liked and feeling nostalgia.

Everyone, let's be sure we stick to the real business of HN: gossip about
companies which were started for no reason other than to get sold, fighting
over the brands of fetishized personal electronics, hagiographies of people
like Steve Jobs and Edward Snowden, flamewars about women in tech, and
preening about how we personally are the top 1% of software engineers and only
hire people like ourselves.

Otherwise, someone might feel saddened.

~~~
doctorstupid
My point is that they are not relating to each other.

Modern conversation seems to be morphing into the art of using others'
comments as triggers for one's own monologue. Instead of having the discipline
of quieting ourselves in order to comprehend what others are saying, we
isolate ourselves into narcissism by placing mirrors onto their heads.

An awareness of this trend may surprise you about how little we actually
relate to each other. Rather, we use others to relate to ourselves.

~~~
irishcoffee
"People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak" [0] - Chuck
Palahniuk

I have tried probably too hard to not be this person. As a result, i've had
literally hundreds of people tell me I'm a great listener. I don't order food
at my usual haunts, they just make it. Letting people talk, and actually
hearing and giving one flying fuck, is more impactful than I ever imagined.

[0]
[http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/37182.html](http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/37182.html)

------
gedrap
I have a little bit similar, just not so sad story.

I was ~12 years old (around 2004), I really wanted to learn programming but
all I had was a cell phone (one of the first budget class phones with GPRS,
Nokia 3510i). I had very little access to internet / pc (about 30min/week) and
couldn't speak English, Russian, or any other major language.

So I tried to get my hands on any PHP code examples, type it in using my
phone, and upload to FTP using some online forms.

Eh, funny times. I wrote a bit more about it
[http://blog.gedrap.me/blog/2013/07/30/writing-code-with-a-
ce...](http://blog.gedrap.me/blog/2013/07/30/writing-code-with-a-cellphone-
back-in-2005/)

------
andsmi2
This quote hurt my head "Windows 2000..., which was basically like 98, but
crappier." But provided context for the entire thing.

~~~
tbrock
Agreed, basically the most incorrect thing I've ever read on the Internet.
Windows 2000 was amazing.

~~~
ArcticCelt
Windows 2000 is one of my favorite OS. I barely used XP because I liked it so
much I almost went straight from 2000 to windows 7.

~~~
stevekemp
Mine too - All the stability of Windows NT 4, but with the addition of USB so
I could use "modern stuff".

Of all the versions of Windows I've ever used 2000 was my favourite.

------
pm
I relate somewhat to poster's situation, as one of my half-brothers had a
somewhat related experience in rural NT, sans the happy ending. If the poster
is reading HN, I'd be happy to catch you up on the state of Australian tech.
My e-mail is in my profile.

~~~
orangecomputer
I'm certainly reading! And with great interest at that, it's very interesting
hearing of the other Australians who were in similar situations. I find it
interesting too how a lot of those from America and other countries are quick
to criticize the story and are shocked at how "you didn't have a mobile phone
at age 13!?" or "I don't believe for a second that he didn't have an ADSL
connection in rural Australia in 2002", or even the assumption that all our
public schools in the outback of Australia were equipped with the latest in
Pentium technology when in fact, some were as far back as 15 years out of
date.

Thanks for the invite too. I don't know where I'd start with modern tech. I've
been building up more knowledge over the years and started by purchasing each
individual part to build my own system in 2009. I'm no whiz but I'd say I have
a reasonable degree of literacy nowadays. The one thing I could use help with
is getting started in modern programming. My head appears to still be stuck in
the idea of using a simple text-editor-style compiler with no additional
libraries, headers, (linkers?) etc required. I had a bit of trouble finding
good tutorials that actually supplied the relevant libraries, headers etc for
the code they were explaining, so it became difficult when they would expect
that every new programmer knows straight away what the SDL header is for
example, and where it can be acquired from.

~~~
pm
Outback public schools are lucky if they're equipped with more than one
toilet.

There are many good tutorials on the Internet for a lot of things, but many
make assumptions for things that aren't specifically code-related (libraries,
linking, etc) that can be frustrating when you're starting. Consider it a rite
of passage.

If you have any questions on anything (there's no such thing as a dumb
question), again feel free to e-mail.

------
brandonmenc
This isn't an OS - it's closer to a DOS shell, like Central Point's PC Tools.

~~~
orangecomputer
Yep, it's more or less a shell. I probably should've clarified it a bit better
in the imgur description. It's basically a dos shell representitive of my
rendition of a "late 1980s OS".

~~~
marvin
Would just like to say thanks for your really fascinating story :) This is the
intellectual highlight of my day. Don't let the naysayers get to you. Not sure
what you're doing at the moment, but I'm sure you've directed your technical
skills towards something that pays well and acquired new ones in the meantime
:)

The projects you describe here are obviously works of love that show great
technical talent. Too bad you didn't have access to better learning resources
at an earlier point in time, but learning is thankfully a multi-decade
project. (I also hope your P.O.S. stepfather got what was coming to him in the
end).

~~~
brandonmenc
> Don't let the naysayers get to you.

Clarification of facts is not naysaying.

I think what they did was impressive and interesting.

~~~
marvin
I wasn't referring to you; I just found a plausible place to reply to OP.
There were plenty of real naysayers in the thread, though. And even more that
were just very insensitive. (Again, I'm not referring to you).

------
adrusi
While I don't have a story quite like OP's, I wanted to share my experiences
with old-school programming in more recent history. In middle and high school
(2008-2014), I had access to modern hardware, the internet and all those
lovely things at home. At school, though, I didn't have access to a computer
most of the time, and yet I wanted to program. What I did have though, was a
TI-84+SE graphing calculator, with a z80 cpu clocked at 15MHz and 24/128K
accessible/total RAM, and 1.5/2.0MB of ROM. Most teachers didn't really care
if I just stuck my nose into that thing for the entire class, so often I did
just that.

For those not familiar with the calculator, it ships with an OS that provides
a shell where the user can input mathematical expressions, as well as a
graphing interface. It also provides a program editor where the user can write
what are essentially shell scripts for the main interface in TI-BASIC, or run
machine code written in hex if the program starts with the AsmPrgm token. It
also lets you transfer files from a PC using a usb port on the calculator. You
could download and install "Apps" for the calculator. When I was 12-14 I
mostly wrote small programs, like Pong and a quadratic factorization utility,
in TI-BASIC, and played games that I downloaded in class.

After a while I tired of TI-BASIC because it was _slow_ , and that limited the
possibilities. I downloaded Axe, an App that modifies the code in RAM of
Kernel's TI-BASIC editor to allow for programs written in a different
language, which was basically assembly + a lot of macros and a standard
library useful for writing games, or like C without a type system. This code
was compiled to machine code on the calculator, and therefore the code ran at
a reasonable speed (keep in mind it's still just a 15MHz cpu from the 70s).

With Axe I made some more interesting programs. Unlike with TI-BASIC, where
learning the language was easy since the calculators main interface was
basically a REPL for the programming language, Axe was hard to learn. I needed
to look at external documentation to know what I was dong in Axe, but even
though I had a smartphone at this point, I couldn't use it in class, so I
printed out the manual to reference it in class. I wrote a bunch of programs
in Axe, like a cellular automata simulator, a game of life program, a 4-level
grayscale sprite editor (which worked by flickering the pixels of the 1-bit
display which had a slow enough response time to create a static gray color if
alternated quickly enough). I also learned z80 assembly and used an on-calc
assembler and editor called mimas, but editing assembly on-calc was too
bothersome with a 64x96 display, so I mostly stuck with Axe.

Eventually I stopped being the nerdy kid who played with his calculator all
day, but I had fallen in love with the platform, so even though I wasn't
writing code in class, I wrote code for the calculator at home, sometimes on
my PC and sometimes on the calculator just because I liked that experience
more.

I'll be sad to see these ancient calculators finally phased out of the math
curriculum in the US, so that kids no longer get access to that last
stronghold of 80s computing. Raspberry Pi is cool, but it's still so much more
modern than the calculators, which hurts its coolness factor for me, but more
importantly, kids won't have access to it unless their parents want them to
get into computing. Soon I see kids only having hardware that seems
impenetrably locked down, which is a real shame.

~~~
tspike
> I realized that my work was technically obsolete as hell, and not really of
> any value.

For all of the benefits of the internet, I see this as a tragic side effect.
Rather than just trying something and seeing if it works, the first instinct
is to Google it to see if anyone else has done something similar. Even if you
manage to start on something, eventually you'll be exposed to someone who's
done it so much better and more thoroughly than you and get discouraged and
give up.

Of course, plenty of innovation still happens and people can find inspiration
in superior implementations, but the loss feels similar to the loss of
biodiversity, or language diversity resulting from globalization -- that is,
isolated populations create vastly different solutions to the same set of
problems in ways that aren't possible without those barriers.

~~~
LnxPrgr3
Experience is worth something, even if it comes from toy projects.

The downside of "lazy learning" is you can't know what tools you'll need in
the future. I was able to win at one of my favorite work projects because I'd
played with signal processing and machine learning for fun.

Had I not, I would've concluded I couldn't beat the terrible solution we had—I
wouldn't have had the tools to know better.

And of course, your reinvented wheel might turn out to be an actual
improvement!

~~~
anon4
I would say that lazy learning is a pretty big boon overall for both you as a
person and society at large. On one hand, you have niche skills that can be
applied professionally, and on the other, you can find people with knowledge
in some niche subject that they can develop on the job pretty quickly. You
will never not find an application for some bit of knowledge.

~~~
LnxPrgr3
Apologies for the late reply, but that's precisely my point: if I only did
lazy learning, I would've missed awesome opportunities.

Of course, I can never know everything. I do both: I learn things as needed to
get something done, and I learn things just because they fascinate me and
might prove useful later. That latter part—gaining knowledge for the sake of
knowledge—has been an amazing benefit, specifically by giving me a better map
of what's possible, and how the seemingly impossible might be done.

IOW, I consider lazy learning necessary, because no one can know everything,
but not something I'd encourage for its own sake, because sometimes you have
to know something before you can know when it'll be useful. I absolutely
encourage playing around just to learn more about your craft—you'll learn
things that will prove useful later.

------
lupinglade
486s typically had 4-16MB RAM. To access this memory in DOS a special driver
needed to be loaded, EXTMEM386.SYS or something like that from what I
remember.

This article really is somewhat misleading, as that is not an OS, rather it is
an application running on DOS.

Did the same sort of thing as a kid on an Atari 130 XE. Was a lot more
graphical though. It's something you do when your computer is essentially
useless :)

------
swatow
_In the late 1990s, my parents divorced, and my mother took my brother and
myself and had us go live in a very rural area of Australia with a psychopath
who was wanted in 3 states. This was our new stepfather, so we were to remain
in isolation so that he wouldn 't be found. This being said, we were not
allowed to leave the house after school hours, nor use the internet, nor own
mobile phones._

Truly shocking that this could happen in Australia. Where were the child
support services? Why didn't the teachers notice anything?

 _The rest they say, is history. Mum finally ditched the guy who made our life
hell. I was allowed to move back to civilization and had my mind absolutely
BLOWN away by Crisis screenshots._

I wonder how old the author was when this happened? Was he still being kept
captive as an adult?

This story raises serious questions about the adequacy of child protection and
law enforcement in Australia.

~~~
vidarh
Consider that in the late 90's cellphone penetration was still low enough that
not being allowed cellphones was fairly common, and certainly not something
anyone would react to.

Not being allowed to leave the house after school hours, or use the internet
is still a fairly common situation for kids in many sects that are not
considered problematic enough to interfere with.

What you describe as "being kept captive", others would consider protecting
their children from corrupting outside influences (I'd like to emphasise that
I absolutely don't think that is right).

That the stepfather in this case seems to have been motivated by hiding from
the authorities doesn't make much difference - the point is most schools have
students that are in similar situations, so it's not something most schools
would see as exceptional and something they can interfere with.

It's a difficult tradeoff in terms of child protection, because the traumatic
experiences of being taken into care or disrupted by lots of interference can
easily become worse than what the interference is meant to fix, and because
the moment you start passing moral judgement over peoples parenting, you're in
for a crazy struggle over how it is acceptable for people to raise their kids.

~~~
orangecomputer
That's a very very logical perspective of it, considering it from both sides.

A lot of times, my parents (mother and stepfather) played it off as "he needs
to be disciplined etc", although they omitted certain truths when it came time
to talk to the police. A punch to the side of the head was a "clip over the
ear" etc. The police however seemed not to care, I will never forget hearing
their "Ah yeah." reactions to it, but again they face the same thing as
mentioned above. Even if you're not legally allowed to hit a child now, it's
still seen in some places here as an unwritten omission of law to discipline
your child if it is "Reasonable", such as a smack on the bum etc.

Indeed being kept inside the home wasn't really the bad part of it all. I have
always been much of a loner, and it was very likely I wouldn't have done much
outside of the home. I did sometimes "Run away" for nights, and I would walk
through the city or walk out into the country for a very very very long time
at night wondering where to go or what to do. Now that I look back on it, I'm
actually very surprised albeit greatful that I never was abducted or robbed.
But at that point, I didn't really care where I went or what happened because
anything seemed better than what was going on at home.

------
ghinda
I also have a similar, but definitely not tragic, story. In the late '90s my
dad got us a ZX Spectrum, so me and my brother learned BASIC and played
Deathchase.

Around ~2000 we got a Pentium "75", that is - 75mhz, 16mb ram, 500mb hdd with
no cdrom or sound card. I think it had a 2mb S3 video card, and came with
Windows 95.

At some point, after some tweaks, you could play Mortal Kombat 4 in a very
small window, installed from multi-rar archives on around ~20 floppys.

We had a lot CDs with games from gaming magazines, with "cool" (or so I
thought at the time) HTML/JavaScript autoruns, that ran with Internet Explorer
4. Since most of these games (eg. NFS 3) wouldn't run on my PC, I found out
how to "View Source", and I basically learned HTML/CSS/JS from them. In 2003 I
sold my first "DHTML" menu widget.

------
robotkilla
Throwing my story in the mix: I owned a 386 and a 486 when I was around 9.
Hand me down computers. My family was poor and we didn't have the internet and
I'm not sure it would have mattered if we did back then. I learned QBASIC and
Dos from library books and help files. Made lots of text adventure games and
later games with minor graphics. I'm a professional developer now (have been
for 12 years). I know multiple languages including python and I still make
games on the side as a hobby.

I keep seeing stories similar to mine. I really think we (humans) have lost
something with new tech. Simple UI breeds users whereas hard seems to breed
developers.

Edit: typed that out on my phone - made some typo fixes.

Also forgot to mention - I never went to school for CS and I dropped out of
community college which I attended for graphic design.

------
kokey
I can relate too, though my situation was also not that bad. Too poor to buy a
computer, learned programming (BASIC mostly for the C64) from library books,
and electronics from library books, and general details about PC hardware from
magazines. This all without having a computer. Then I managed to repair and
salvage enough old PC parts to piece together my first 8086 PC, eventually
upgraded to a 286. We were long distance calls away from any city so dial up
connections were impossibly expensive, so I learned to hack my way around some
online services and phone phreaking to get myself onto the internet in 1993. I
then got hooked on Unix and the internet and it became my ticket out of our in
the middle of nowhere town all the way to living in the developed world.

------
sauere
QBasic... those were the days.

I actually started programming around 2002/2003\. At that time QBasic was of
course already horribly outdated. But that was what my school teacher was
using. We used it to have direct PEAK/POKE access to the LPT-Port (the big,
bulky printer port!). So we connected LEDs and other Stuff to the LPT Pins and
made them blink with QBasic (and Windows 2000).

I still sticked to QBasic a while because i refused to learn anything else and
C-Style languages just looked scary to me. By the way, if you are looking for
a cool, modern, cross-platform BASIC Compiler take a look at FreeBasic. It
started out as a QBasic-kompatible Interpreter but now is a Project on it's
own.

~~~
orangecomputer
Now that would've been more interesting. I never got to experiment with
printing or connecting anything to my own system, but it would've been fun to
make something like what you've described.

Indeed C was a bit intimidating to me at first. I took up a TAFE games
programming course in 2008 to learn it, but our teacher was an ex-banker and
didn't seem to really have any enthusiasm for games, and there wasn't really
any "games programming" in the course. I left after getting mugged in broad
daylight on a busy road (Mount Druitt is absolutely atrocious, never going
back there again!)

------
centizen
This OS is interesting enough on it's own, but I want to hear more of the
story of how and why it was created.

~~~
orangecomputer
I wrote it up as best as I could in the imgur description, but I'll see if I
can summarize it here.

Basically, I was without any modern resources for quite some time. I had a
486, QBASIC and EDIT.com to play with; the rest of the DOS exes etc I didn't
want to touch out of fear of buggering up my system as I wasn't very computer
literate.

My library had two 1970s books on BASIC which I loaned out (Basic BASIC and
Advanced BASIC by James S Coan) and with nothing else to do in the hours after
school, I decided to try my hand at it. I played around with it for a bit and
built a really primitive "DOS Clone", which relied on a simple series of
INPUT's, PRINT's, IF / THEN statements and GOTO. I then also began
experimenting with the ASCII Character map which was included in the QBASIC
help file, and realized that if I used the correct ASCII codes, I was able to
form visualizations on the screen, simple GUIs etc. I combined the two and
began adding more and more functionality to it until I eventually named it
"OSCI" ("Aussie"). That's pretty much all there was to it.

How: An old 486, QBASIC, and lots of free time

Why: Boredom, curiosity.

------
FrankenPC
Where did he get the books? When I was a kid, the DOS interrupt bible was
something I turned into a dog-eared nightmare. I wonder if he had access to
technical books through his school maybe?

~~~
orangecomputer
I had access to two programming books; Basic BASIC and Advanced BASIC by James
S Coan which I loaned out (and frequently over-loaned) from my high school
library. I searched intensely during lunch periods at the library for other
books on anything related to computers and programming, but I don't recall any
other notable computer books.

The books I had loaned out however were dated 1977 - 1978 according to a
recent google search. Very obsolete for the time. I'm tempted to call the high
school library and see if I can buy them, since they'd be even more so useless
for any student who wants to get into programming now.

Better yet, it's just given me an idea, if they still haven't updated their
books on programming, I might even see if I can buy a few good modern books on
C / Python etc and donate them to the library, along with software. Who knows,
it might stop someone else from ending up the same way I did.

------
WoodenChair
The story sounds like it has some significant parallels to that of Julian
Assange in his teenage years (at least as depicted in the movie Underground).
Is he an inspiration to you?

~~~
orangecomputer
I haven't seen the movie, but I have read once that he used to sleep to orange
lights as he believed humans would sleep better to it after being accustomed
to sleeping by the light of a fire for many many years.

I'll have to look into his early years and see, although I was probably
nowhere near. I was a very emotionally unstable and unusual kid after the move
to the country. I had zero social skills and a lot of post traumatic stress
disorder from events at home. My methods to socializing and living in general
were very odd.

I hoarded food and possessions as the cupboards at home were often (but not
always) padlocked to keep me from picking my own food out. I would hunt around
in bins for discarded food or 5 cent coins to save for canteen food and was
referred to as a "scab" quite a bit, but I tended to ignore this, even though
I was probably seen as one of "Those oddball kids". I had very little value
placed on my reputation.

A lot of my possessions were often confiscated, and anything of special value
(ie gifts from my dad) were often smashed and broken in front of me. I had a
beautiful Carramar Lava Lamp once that he purchased for me which was destroyed
by my stepfather to stop me from staying up at night and using it to read. The
trait still sticks with me now; I don't hoard general junk, but I am extremely
protective of my current possessions.

Not sure if this ties in with Julian Assanges story. Again I'll have to check
it out. He sounds like a very intriguing person.

------
vivin
This is amazing. This took me back to the 90's when I was learning BASIC by
scrounging for books in our school library. I grew up in Oman and there
weren't too many programming resources. So I had to make do with random BASIC
books that were often in different dialects (Apple BASIC for example).

I also reinvented the wheel many times and wrote a bunch of silly little
programs. It was a great and fun experience and this story really took me
back.

------
VLM
Two oddities, there's a technical difference between a GUI desktop environment
and an operating system, even if the commercial vendors insist they're
conjoined twins and alternatives to that worldview are a thoughtcrime. So this
is an OS of the Gnome variety, not a OS of the retroBSD variety.

The other oddity having lived thru a slightly earlier era in high school, we
did TONS of sneakernet peer 2 peer filesharing using floppies. The stuff he
needed would be getting would be kinda obsolete, on the other hand the school
had stuff laying around so if you wanted a "turbo C" it was literally sitting
in the library waiting for you to copy it. Anyway I'm surprised he never found
anyone to trade "warez" with.

In '99 when the story started I already had 5 or 6 years of experience with a
linux desktop at home, first with SLS floppy based installs off a BBS, but by
99 I had a couple years experience with Debian, makes you wonder what would
have happened if the guy had been on an abandoned isle with a linux distro
instead of quickbasic...

------
pjbrunet
Looks like typical apps we all created during the early 90s. I taught my
little brother Pascal in what seemed like a few minutes (I think he was in 5th
grade) and within a weekend he created a file manager that would blow this one
away. My brother is very smart but my point is, coding some DOS games or a
file manager is not anything remarkable, even if you only had the manual to
work from. Most developers during that time period worked from a manual. We
did not have StackExchange, haha. Where do you think RTFM comes from? I'm
surprised this is trending. If you want to see what was typical of the early
90s, take a look at the Graphics Gems books [http://www.amazon.com/Graphics-
Gems-Andrew-S-Glassner/dp/012...](http://www.amazon.com/Graphics-Gems-Andrew-
S-Glassner/dp/0122861663) every bookstore in the US had Graphics Gems.

------
Igglyboo
What was your experience level before you started this?

I'm about to graduate with a degree in computer science and I would love to
work on a long term project like this but I feel like I could never accomplish
something remotely close to the complexity involved in your project,
especially without outside help like the internet.

~~~
percept
Reminds me of the story recently about the guy who built a game over what, ten
years or so? (Can't find a link right now.)

~~~
reefab
"Babylonian twins"? Made by a Iraqi starting in the 90s.

[http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwshihab_en.p...](http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwshihab_en.php)

------
agumonkey
Reminded me of the classic 'stuck in a room' reddit thread

[http://www.reddit.com/comments/9x15g/programming_thought_exp...](http://www.reddit.com/comments/9x15g/programming_thought_experiment_stuck_in_a_room)

~~~
orangecomputer
I guess I've answered the threads question in a sense.

Though I wish I'd at least had a basic copy of Windows XP, and a good C++
compiler + some reference books.

------
nashashmi
I find it painful to know that there are people like this who live like this
painfully everyday: * people with old computers because they cannot get new
ones, * people with old crappy android phones because they cannot get the new
kind of phones, * people who are poor and are working on some rundown computer
that does not work very nicely because it is worn down, and other people who
are just stuck with whatever they have and how we will never hear their story
because ... well.

And when I say people, I really mean kids. Heartbreak!

------
scoot
"Was isolated from 1999"

So why label it (c) Copyright 1995?
[http://i.imgur.com/XSDOXEZ.png](http://i.imgur.com/XSDOXEZ.png)

~~~
orangecomputer
That's a very good question. I can't actually remember any particular
inspiration for using 1995 as a start date, but it was probably just a random
year to give it an "Authentic" look as if it had been some old shell system
for the TAFE that had been in use for ages (ie much like how most software
will have "copyright 1996-2014" to certify the date on which the copyright was
filed and what the current year was. It was however, never meant to be an
authentic piece of software or have any significant numbers, merely written as
a brief demonstration that used a few simple commands to list file and
directory structures. 2006 was the year that code would've been made though.

------
stuaxo
He should learn python, after wbasic it was the first language I used that was
as easy or fun(after years of java).

------
codezero
I had a 486 in 1991. If this person had one from 1999 to 2006 I'm amazed it
didn't suffer repeated hardware failures. Hard drives die often. I want to
believe this isn't true because it's too depressing. I want to believe it's
true because people deserve the benefit of the doubt.

~~~
orangecomputer
Today I still have a working Pentium 1 with hard disks in full operating
order.

As for the 486, I brought it down to my dads when I moved, and switched to
using his much more modern system. It did eventually "die" in 2007-2008. My
dad threw it out after the clock chip failed on the motherboard. I was pretty
bummed because it sounds like a fairly straightforward fix / such a minor
issue, but he's as sentimental as I and referred to it as "an old clunker".

~~~
codezero
Fair enough, pardon my previous skepticism, I hope things are going better for
you now!

~~~
orangecomputer
Completely understandable; My modern system has suffered enough hard disk
failures to put it in the 2 digit range, and I've gone through around 7
graphics cards. Likely the result of having a computer that is constantly
exposed to extremely tropical humidity and sea air. The last graphics card I
had to die (only a few nights ago as a matter of fact) has rust on it, and is
only a year old.

They don't build em like they used to! The Pentium 1 interior blew me away
upon opening it. Not a tad of corrision, rust, or even dust! Also the disks
are still in top notch shape and seem to read just fine.

------
mironathetin
Great story. Is it fair to say, if he had had internet, television, cinemas
and tons of friends around, he would never have achieved that?

I see our kids every day staring at various screens, being miles away from any
creative impulse and getting really mad, if we discuss (or execute) internet
access limits.

~~~
orangecomputer
It's very hard to say.

Right before leaving for the country, circa 1997-1998, my best friend was
trying to get me into C++, as he was a games dev / games fanatic like I was. I
had always wanted to get my hands into C++ and start working with it. It never
really transpired sadly as I had no idea where to start.

------
pwr22
This guy's mother made a terrible and selfish choice :(, I feel terrible for
him

------
abhididdigi
If there is one story that changed me today, it's this. Kudos to you sir. With
no internet/help you still pursued your passion and built this from Ground UP.

Thank you for the inspiration, and have a great career ahead.

------
drinchev
I only imagine what would've happened if OP was stuck with a UNIX or even
better Linux with source code files included.

It would be a really different story I guess...

~~~
orangecomputer
I really wish that I had Linux around that time. It's always piqued my
curiosity but I fear I wouldn't be able to think of a practical purpose for it
(however that probably also stems from a lack of knowledge about Linux itself
and what it can do). I have as much knowledge of Linux and its capabilities as
a 3 year old would in driving a car.

------
reitanqild
Totally impressed. Yes, not an os but a shell but still impressive.

Boredoom can easily lead to creativity it seems. And this guy is smart.

~~~
orangecomputer
Indeed, I've re-worked the title to include quotes around the "OS" parts as
everyone who states that it is a shell is actually correct. I should've termed
it better.

Indeed having no inspiration or having a lot of boredom leaves the mind to
create its own entertainment and innovation, however I'd disagree that I'm
smart. My code is merely a series of hackery and visual tricks. It technically
-does- do what it is supposed to, but it is nowhere near as maintainable,
optimized and well written as the code of that of a talented or seasoned
programmer.

Thanks for your kind words!

------
DaveSapien
Yes, write a book. It would sell like hot cakes to us. You've inspired the
shit out of me today!!

~~~
orangecomputer
I'd love to write a larger and more in depth recount of it, and release it
alongside the codes someday. I would more than likely release it for free, or
if it ever got published, donate a lot of the proceeds to a domestic violence
charity.

------
jdbiggs
Hey, OP, I'd love to talk to you. Email me at john @ biggs.cc. Everyone else
can email me too!

------
mariuolo
Nice to see how necessity is (still) the mother of invention.

BTW, is the guy in jail now?

~~~
orangecomputer
Sadly not as far as I know.

As proven with the recent attack in Sydney (the guy had been walking free with
40 charges against him), my stepfather was in the precise same position.
Multiple charges but walking free because the justice system had
catastrophically failed.

------
leke
When I started reading this, I imagined the author was going to say, isolated
from 1999 to 2006 with a 486 on an island living with a group of scientists
called The Dharma Initiative, with no connection to the outside world.

------
Zen101
Amazing story!

------
curiously
did a similar thing in the late 90s. I didn't have a computer besides an old
286 with monochrome monitor because my parents would not let me use a brand
new computer because it would affect my school studies as I would play games
(they weren't wrong).

I discovered a program called qbasic and started fooling around with it. I did
whatever I could on it. It was so interesting.

Then after about a year I got a fast computer because my dad felt sorry for me
and I just started using the internet to download emulators and roms. I lost
the same level of patience back when I used to have a 286.

Anyways I still remember those times. Magical moments like figuring out how to
program. I wonder what would've happened if I had kept going. Sadly, the
internet and video games completely took over.

~~~
orangecomputer
Exactly what happened to me in 2006 when I left the country. I wanted to catch
up on everything; I had Deus Ex, the Quake series, DOOM etc to get through.

Now if I try and code something, there are too many distractions, yet when
you're sitting in a silent basement, your ideas tend to fill your head pretty
quick (+ many a hot dull afternoon at school).

------
foo-licious
Pretty sure everyone that started programming on an x86 and pre windows 95
already did this exact same thing. I did this when I was 8 and did it in a few
days. No story here except OP is a slow learner. Sorry but this is true.

