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qingcharles 3 days ago

They had computers in one place I was in, but not connected to the Net, just for doing some basic word processing and typing tutorials.

I found the C# compiler that is hidden several levels deep by default in the Windows directory and decided to teach the other prisoners how to code. I needed some reference materials as it's really hard when you have no docs and literally just the compiler. They don't allow computer books in most places "for security reasons", but a very elderly nun took pity on me and asked me what I wanted. I told her "C# Weekend Crash Course" (I wasn't a C# dev at the time and it was the only title I could think of) and she bought it off Amazon and smuggled in not only the book but the CD-ROM that came with it, bless her. I managed to teach the guys how to write text adventures which they enjoyed. I couldn't think of what else fun I could get them to do with only console text in/out.

nextaccountic 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I couldn't think of what else fun I could get them to do with only console text in/out.

maybe specialized calculators that ask some parameters (like "how many days" etc) and run some formulas

could even be useful for something

qingcharles 3 days ago | parent [-]

I wish I'd had a bunch of those BASIC programming books from the 8-bit home computer era, they had a ton of fun games based only on simple console input and output.

anthk 3 days ago | parent [-]

You can just run bwbasic today (or blassic) and clone the Basic Computer Games from

https://github.com/GReaperEx/bcg

https://github.com/John-Titor/bwbasic

anthk 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, Scoundrel/Donsol it's a game that can be run with just a deck of cards, and porting it to C# it's a trivial task from ANSI C with simple arithmetic:

https://codeberg.org/luxferre/scoundrel-ports