Learning how to program in Oman in the 90’s

I can one up you. I learned how to program in Oman in the 80&#x27;s.<p>Most of what I learned was on a C64, initially basic but very quickly switched to assembly.<p>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.<p>In terms of actual games, there were two avenues:<p>- 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 &#x27;there&#x27;s mail for you&#x27;.<p>- 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&#x27;d just use it for gaming).<p>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.<p>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&#x2F;university and discovering like minded people on BBSs and then the internet in the early 90&#x27;s was pretty life changing. Suddenly I was not alone, it turns out there&#x27;s a huge swathe of people that have the exact same passions!

&gt; 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.<p>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.<p>I remember learning to type `help` and running the various commands that appeared with trial&#x2F;error as an enjoyable experience, not one that was intimidating. And I wasn&#x27;t a particularly precocious kid, my nerd-dom was late blooming.<p>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).

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.

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&#x27;s I think.<p>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.<p>That was a nice read!

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 :)

For the slighter earlier Late 70&#x27;s &amp; 80&#x27;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.