I'm noticing a good deal of BBS references lately in HN stories, and I can't help being amused by this...because, as it happens, the company I started in 1989 when I was fresh out of school wrote realtime interactive BBS software.

If you are so inclined, check out page 6 of this "ancient" scan of a newsletter (yes, advertising for online software used to be done by newsletter :) produced around 1993...my company, MagiComm, wrote an online search engine, very nice ANSII realtime interactive games like Sub Striker and Backgammon (with ELO ratings no less), and other pretty cool stuff.

http://pdf.textfiles.com/zines/MAJORNEWS/majornewsv4i1.pdf

Code was straight C, with BTREE tables (no SQL) on 386/486s and, in the beginning, a 640k memory limit.

You may not approve of my development choices but you sure can't say I was behind the times.

Anyway, it's super gratifying to read about kids being inspired by BBS software, knowing I created a tiny part of it.

Oh wow, I was thinking of writing a very similar post too. Denthor's tutorials were one of my first introductions to programming, and I too fondly remember typing them all into Turbo Pascal and trying to understand exactly what they did. I've always wondered what Denthor / Grant Smith was up to in the years after the tutorials, and if he ever thought about how many people he might have helped get interested in programming.

If anyone's curious you can actually find Denthor's tutorials here: http://textfiles.com/programming/astrainer.txt

I also searched around a bit and found this good thread that seems to indicate Denthor is doing well these days and lives in England with a family: http://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=7530&page=1

I started "programming" in the mid eighties during primary school. I made little games, and made the PC play music and that sort of nonsense. As I got older the games got more advanced, I even built a simple graphical OS so my parents didn't have to use DOS.

Strangely I never considered my hobby as a possible career path.

It wasn't until 1997 that I realised I could make a living out of being a developer. At the time I was working in my uncles PC store repairing computers and doing some basic web development stuff (for free) for his customers.

One day my uncle introduced me to a guy in his late sixties. He was a farmer that had taught himself to code and had written a piece of software called FarmBase. He wanted my help to update the application for Windows (until then it ran only in DOS). After talking at length he offered to sell me the software for some nominal fee essentially as long as I promised to "do it justice". At that time he was making good coin off the app, but couldn't keep up the maintenance (he was earning 5-10x what he offered to sell it to me for, so I'd make back the investment in 2-3 months). Sadly, I didn't have the money and let the offer pass.

The upside is that until that moment I'd never considered "writing code" as something that could be a real career. Not only was I inspired to write code for a living, I was inspired to (eventually) run a software company.

This was the first demo I ever saw:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2suZ1KkZ9HI

Which one of my brothers downloaded via BBS (amazingly, my small hometown had a BBS when few people even had PCs). I had no idea what it was at the time, but in retrospect it is pretty impressive - there were really no popular 3D games at that time that I can recall.

A lot of the Spore (EA/Maxis) team was composed of demosceners - I was later invited to work on it but never took up the offer (after reading some horror stories about EA hours).

All I wanted to do was play shopkeeper. A kid of 8, I was a happy tester for the inventory control software my dad wrote in the 1990s. I bought items and sold them. I had brand-name goods in my inventory master, with MRPs and re-order levels. Virtual lemonade stand. I still find that idea fun.

Neat article.

About 20 years ago I saw a demo called 'Ambiance' by Tran (aka Thomas Pytel). I became so taken with it (and the very humble readme file that accompanied it) that I wanted to try my hand at creating something similar. This sent me down a similar path of learning to program first from Denthor's files, and then to a simpler technology I became fascinated by: HTML.

20 years and a successful web-app programming career later I've done some x86 demos for fun, but still haven't recreated anything as magical as that demo was to me. I owe such a debt of inspiration to all the demo crews... maybe one of these days I'll do a WebVR version of Tran's work to say thanks. 360 degree Luminati?

I wonder if these folks know how valued they are to some of us?

These "tuts" are amazingly nostalgic.

Between this and Fravia I probably learned more about how computers worked than any other course or article. I remember running through most of these to build up my own personal GFX library. Silly things like "draw random lines" versus "draw random lines REALLY FAST" kept me interested long beyond any reasonable attention span. Thanks @tdicola for the link to the texts!

I'm only sad that I've forgotten so much, and that it's getting harder and harder to make cool stuff like this - there are still ways to get a 1:1 array:pixel mapping and have at, but they're all more complicated than MOV AX, 13h; INT 10h; and $A000.

Besides the Asphyxia Trainers, back then there was also HelpPC [0], PCGPE [1], RBIL [2], and mammon_'s work in ASM Journal [3] available on BBSes and early interwebs.

[0] http://stanislavs.org/helppc/

[1] http://www.oocities.org/siliconvalley/2151/pcgpe.html

[2] http://www.ctyme.com/rbrown.htm

[3] http://mattst88.com/programming/AssemblyProgrammersJournal

How to hook a 13 year old on a life-long love of bare metal:

I actually learned how to code in C and x86 asm mostly from Denthor's tutorials discovered on some local Boston-area. It lead me to GCC (DJGPP), Linux and love for low-level kernel hacking. I went in a different direction career-wise, but what I learned at 13 from those tutorials taught me something fundamental about computing hardware. I made fire. I mean, I made plasma effects by talking directly to the hardware to put it in the mode I wanted, kicking off inline asm to do the twiddly stuff. How fun is that?

Geez, completely forgot about FILE_ID.DIZ. When seeing it, it instantly brought back heaps of memories!

I doubt you could call this programming but I copied my first program from a magazine called Nibble (Apple ][ mag) for a cheat editor (it was either for Wizardry or Ultima, I don't recall) when I was 11 or 12. So many pokes and peeks :-)

Ran a BBS in the 80's and hacked at the software a bit (anyone remember Forum-PC, I think it was written by a 14yo!) that was written in Pascal. That was probably my first taste of coding.

I still re-read these every few years for fun. At the time, I had two Pascal compilers. Borland Turbo Pascal 2.0, and Microsft QuickPascal (not sure what version).

The code didn't work out of the box in either compiler, someone on a newsgroup showed me how to convert the asm calls over.

Later on I got an Andre Lamothe book and basically stalled out, trying to learn C programming and game programming at the same time. Fun stuff.

I learned a lot from Denthor... I even emailed him back in the day and asked him about the first election after apartheid and if he voted (he was South African) and he responded and said that he did. Seemed like a great guy.

I also learned a lot from a book called: Flights of Fantasy (taught you how to build a flight simulator).

That is basically my origin story too... only I was in a different part of the world. I even read through that very same text file.

My story differs a bit in that I didn't have many friends and was making my own games in BASIC on my Amiga 500 before I found BBSs and started my journey there.

These tuts were how I got started too, only a bit later than BBS (I believe I got them from the hornet archive, which I got a LOT of tutorials from). I would never have gotten into coding if it hadn't been for all the awesome demoscene tutorials that got me hooked.

Wow, haven't thought of these in 20 years. At the time, I was thirteen or so and remember being stumped by the use of sin and cos (pronounced as you'd expect a kid to), magical functions that let you draw cubes.

Since nobody else seems to have advertised it here, there's a demoscene event in San Jose this March!

http://nv.scene.org/2015/

BBS demos also got me into programming, but I started with C even though everyone was using Pascal. I don't recall why. Anyway I never made any BBS demos haha.

At my first job interning out of college, I named my box Denthor as a vote of thanks to the person who showed me the difference between average and mind blowing.

I got these tutorials on a CD that came with some kind of Book. I found them to be quite inspiring.

It's a pity that nobody can figure out what became of Denthor.

A bit off topic, I really like your website design. What did you design it with?

You brought a smile to my weary eyes.

I myself wanted to be a farmer. Everyone has to eat, you see, so I figured I could charge as much money as I wanted to. I'd be rich!