[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).

[Jugurtha]

>I hear this a lot in retrospectives but was this really that challenging?

What was more challenging in my opinion/experience wasn't the technical aspect; it was the social/human aspect. I live in Algeria and I had a computer since age 4 and started BASIC at 9 and all is good, but there was no Homebrew Computer Club. We were among the first in the country to get a machine like that (it cost the same as a piece of land).

Granted, we also didn't have internet in 91 and the country was in a bloody civil war where you're happy when "only" 10 people get decapitated a day, people waiting in line to get groceries hoping to get home before curfew, and children being taught tradecraft.. but for someone my age, humans would have been more useful.

It's the microcosm/scene/culture that was lacking the most. People to live your interest with, to show your programs to, to learn from. The encouragement of knowing there even exists a scence/culture where that stuff is cool instead of asking myself why on earth I, as a non English speaker in a non English speaking country, am looking up every word in a function description in the dictionary to make sense out of it. Doing that stuff at that age in a computer desert instead of being among your peers was more challenging than any technical difficulties.

[ralfd]

> I hear this a lot in retrospectives but was this really that challenging? ... I remember learning to type `help`

I assume you grew up in an english speaking country.

The submitted article is about Oman in Arabia. And for me too as a German 7-8 year old kid the command line help page was inscrutable black magic incantations in latin.

[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.

[Spooky23]

Same here. I had to nurse an old PC XT along, and ended up developing a system of boot scripts to optimize memory and other configuration for different games.

Probably pretty trivial in reality, but I was very proud of it at the time. :)

[nikatwork]

Depends on your hardware. Some games required extensive noodling with CONFIG.SYS and memory flags to run. This was essentially pre-internet so it sucked unless you had some local help.

[khedoros]

> I hear this a lot in retrospectives but was this really that challenging?

I guess what I remember around that age was using various games' bootdisk utilities to generate disks, then looking at the contents, blindly fooling around with different combinations of settings to get my games working by trial and error. Navigation was pretty easy, but getting memory-constrained things working without some key concepts (x86 real mode memory, stack sizes, file handles, etc) was a challenge.

I think the "help" command was added in MS-DOS 5.0, and I know that I at least started using DOS before then.

[vivin]

It was more or a relative assessment of difficulty than absolute; I was comparing it to what it takes to play a game these days. Back then you had to do more legwork. It wasn't objectively that difficult though.