[spankibalt]

Albeit it sort of worked for the kidlets on their lo-rez screens, demoscene- and/or game-style visual aesthetics were (and often still are) a bad choice for good application UI design. But that's of course mostly just preference talking.

[squarefoot]

Back then (no Internet for most and scarce documentation) learning proper coding wasn't easy; I recall when a good number of games, demos and some utilities too stopped working because programmers ignored or simply didn't know the guidelines (RKM books were costly for demoscene kids) and used address registers to store data. The plain 68000 CPU had internal 32 bit address registers, but physical address bus was 24 bit only, so one could use the most significant 8 bits to store data that wouldn't affect at all the working on a 24 bit bus, but when CPUs with full physical addressing came out, any program using that trick would point to other locations than those intended and thus would fail.

[burnt-resistor]

In the 80's and 90's, I learned on the evil cousin, the PC, by spending all of my money on overpriced hardware reference books at Computer Literacy Bookshop of Santa Clara. Being a broke, car-less high school student, it was perhaps the only time I ever used VTA light rail from Blossom Valley.

Examples:

- The Programmer's PC Sourcebook 155615321X

- The Undocumented PC 0201622777

- PC Intern: The Encyclopedia of System Programming 1557553041

Coupled with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++, until I could afford Borland C++ 3.1 by virtue of getting a job at Egghead Software. :D "Stack Overflow" was the 4 other people in the under-resourced, purposefully (un)managed high school computer lab run by the wisdom of one Dr. Richard Thaw. It had awful PS/2 model 25's and 30's that were an upgrade from discarded PCjr's. It did, however, have 10BASE2 thin-net and a nominal Novell 2.x or 3.x file server.

[IcePic]

Even AmigaBasic (by Microsoft) did this, so it also broke on 68020+.

[immibis]

One thing to remember is that these pixels looked a lot different when rendered on a typical CRT of the time.