Are you still excited by the internet?

There is a remake of Commander Keen 4 in QuickBASIC 4.5 (QuickBASIC being QBASIC plus compiler/debugger).

http://www.phatcode.net/downloads.php?id=112

 

wooooow, that's insane. I wish that was available in 1993! I had QuickBASIC and could barely recreate the "bananas" demo game.

 

I was far too focused on recreating Zork. I rewrote my parser so many times trying new tricks to improve upon the design but never quite got to the point Zork had. Still was a blast trying though.

 

A computer usually came with a manual how to program it.

And there were those amazing useful things called "shops", they sold "books" and software.
And to learn what you additionally need you could read a bunch of paper with letters and pictures printed on it… they called them "computer magazines".

Even "sharing" software worked great and extremely fast in the early 80s (remember: small world, six degrees of separation).
Usually, after school, you found the nerds in the computer show rooms of the department stores. One of the sports was to let the "specialized" salespersons look foolish and incompetent by doing awesome stuff with the machines like using the Datasette as audio sampler.

They still offer access to books that you can't get online.
In the one I've used you could request them to order the magazines and books you wanted which is (was?) really nice.

3 and of them was free of ads, the other two showed ads only from 18:00-20:00. Actually in these days I switched channels to watch ads because I liked to see how the format evolved over the years which happened much faster than today.

Inside the country it took 1-2 days for a letter to arrive but sending a parcel (with software lol) to australia took 2 weeks.