[taeric]

Yeah, my view was Visual C++ was not so difficult to use; but that it was difficult to have access to. You had to have a computer that could run it, and then you had to be able to afford it. Am I shocked that some people had access to it? No. It is surprising that it would be someone's first access, though.

[rramadass]

Actually it was the norm for Microsoft technology programmers (there was/is a huge number of them) and not surprising at all. You went from MS-DOS to Win16/Win32 to Visual C++ as MS kept releasing them, specifically the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit was a major checkpoint. IIRC the first version of VC++ was released on Windows NT 3.51 (or was it 4?) on a Intel 386 platform. The PC clones were available everywhere and in true hacker fashion people ran cracked copies of Windows NT and VC++ if they could not afford to buy it. For many programmers VC++/MFC was their first introduction to C++ language programming and i still remember trying to explain to noob programmers the distinction between MS' libraries/additions vs. plain vanilla C++ language.

[taeric]

That makes sense. It just barely post-dates my experiences.