[JeremyNT]

The rise of free software on the Internet indeed pleasantly surprised me as well.

In '94 I was running some then-ancient - but still horrifically expensive - Mac, barely able to connect to a dial-up ISP on my ancient rural phone lines. The entire system was essentially impenetrable to me; I didn't even have any kind of concept of how I might write software for it and had no idea where to learn. The primitive tools I could find, like resedit or applescript, could hardly scratch the surface of what was possible.

Linux existed then, surely, but it wasn't something I could have sussed out myself until later on. The idea that everything running on a computer could have source code that you could read, and then build into a workable system, was completely unfathomable to me until I went off to college.

Now, any would-be programmer can start programming with an immensely powerful IDE after a few minutes, and they can access millions of lines of "in the wild" high quality code in hundreds of programming languages instantly.

As much as some things seem to have failed us along the way, at least in this respect things have indeed worked out better than I could have imagined.

[anthk]

Similar to you but in 2001 with Windows 98 and Visual C++. I began to learn to code with C++ under Windows. The nightmares.

Resedit -> ResHacker

Apple Script -> VBScript

Now, heck, the OS for hackers (9front) it's dumb easier on design and C programming. And, before, Linux with {Perl and/or TCL}/TK made casual coding zillions times easier than Win32.