[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.