From 1988-91, I was a volunteer teacher in Africa. I lived in a hut without running water or electricity, and I had a subscription to Byte.

There was also almost nothing to read, so when my monthly issue of Byte appeared (2-3 months later than most people would receive it), I devoured that thing. I would read it literally cover to cover, including all those ads, several times.

I wasn't (then) working in IT, so a lot of the content (like Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar) went way over my head but it didn't matter, I read it anyway, often by the light of my kerosene lantern. I learned a huge amount: object-oriented programming, this new thing called the Internet (capitalized back then, and before the WWW), and how Jerry Pournelle was a self-important jerk (but boy, did I envy the toys he got to play with!).

This was the age of big, fold-out Gateway 2000 ads, 20MB hard drives, and Turbo Pascal kicking other compilers' butts.

I would read the magazine, then write out programs (in BASIC, the only language I had learned at that point). On my monthly trips to the capital city I would go to a local NGO and in exchange for helping with their IT issues they would let me play (i.e type out my programs and try to get them working) on their computers.

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le-mark 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

lol greetings fellow Basic pencil coder! I used to also write basic programs by hand because I didn’t have a computer.

Pournelle original claim to fame was as one of the authors of “Strategy of Technology“ which was very influential in the 70s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_of_Technology

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mlhpdx 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My people. My first paid programming was hand translating a BASIC app to C. I did it on the same paper the original was printed on (green/white continuous feed). When I thought I had it right I went to my mom’s work in the middle of the night to type it in and check it. Over the course of a summer I made it work.

The money went to buying my first computer (kit).

	▲	rigonkulous 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Hail, fellow BYTE'ian! I took what I learned from BYTE and wrote a CP/M terminate/stay-resident 'driver' that got some interesting hardware working well enough to get me the contract, as a teenager, to write the DOS driver for thing as well. That led to a rocket-ride career through decades of systems programming, and I just can't thank the BYTE folks enough for those mind-expanding days ..
	▲	k4rnaj1k an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

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SilentM68 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yea, I hear Ya! I wrote BASIC programs by hand, as well at home while in high school for the same reason :)

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ultratalk 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What country were you in?

	▲	gramie 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I was in Lesotho, a small country completely surrounded by South Africa (when the White farmers were expanding and taking all the Africans' farmland, they left Lesotho because it was all mountains, but with no minerals).