Comment by pentaphobe

Was offline and had no tech people or resources around, but got access to an unused 286 which booted into a mysterious "C:\" prompt

Slowly worked out how navigate the system, then tried running the various built in things I found

One of these was QBASIC. Started reading through and messing with the example games which were part of the built-in QBASIC in MS-DOS

Reverse engineering how they worked gave a lot of the core concepts (variables, loops, procedures)

After writing a few (very) naff text adventures I stumbled across the intriguingly named "DEBUG" tool

Used debug to step through some of the other built in MSDOS utilities and try to work out what the mysterious symbols were doing (how I learnt assembler and machine code)

Later when I finally found BBSs I started debugging/disassembling some of the BBS mini-demos which were ubiquitous those days, which introduced me to manipulating graphical memory etc.. The smaller size of these, and fact that they were generally coded in assembler was much more useful than reading through compiled code

I do not recommend writing assembler in DEBUG, but wouldn't trade in the learning I got from exploring a total black box with no references or learning resources (beyond time and curiosity)

Felt like doing alchemy