As one of the older folks here on HN, I fondly remember the time when almost everything had to be done by reverse-engineering. Some friends of mine and I were t

As one of the older folks here on HN, I fondly remember the time when almost everything had to be done by reverse-engineering. Some friends of mine and I were the first people to reverse engineer the Commodore 4040/8050 disk drive "computers". We had to write all of the software to do this, including custom disassemblers that eventually spat out printouts that we annotated first by hand and later transcribed into source code files. There were no memory maps, and our knowledge of electronics was too rudimentary to figure out much by looking at the traces on the circuit boards. There were no places for folks to discuss these ideas - bulletin boards of the day were one-user-at-a-time things which meant that topics like this were way too niche to garner any discussion at all. I was fortunate enough to grow up in Toronto which was a hot-bed of Commodore hackers and we had a vibrant community that could gather to meet face-to-face to discuss ideas. But in between meetups we had to sit and think harder until we figured it out. It was a wonderful time to learn about computing from first principles without the distractions that exist today.