ya, i made rage and nightmare, just shared them w/ some friends. the guys that made fate x went to a nearby high school funny enough but never knew them personally.
lol i def picked up some autocad and other things that way for friends of my family. i was fortunate enough to have a neighbor give me a copy of VB3 he got from work after i got back from a summer camp learning QBASIC. the simplicity of the form designer in VB was total magic. i spent so many nights up late reading/downloading sample projects to see how people made the controls work together.
So many fond memories of that time.
I remember getting VB3 in 300 emails from an AOL chat room.