True story: I was born in Saudi Arabia and the internet hadn't arrived. But I was deep into building games. I wanted to load .bmps in my game but I couldn't figure out the format. My dad had PC Mag from Ziff Davis press which had a small table explaining how the BMP format has first 2 bytes as 'BM' then 4 reserved bytes, followed by 2 byte width and 2 byte height, then 1024 bytes for palette and the image array... I had to figure out how to decode everything but man, the 7th grader was so happy when an image I made was plotted on the TC DOS screen in VGA!
I'm glad that era is gone. It took too long to learn. When I went to my cousins in Pakistan who had internet, he showed me Yahoo (google wasn't a thing yet) and the very first thing I searched for was File Formats, and there was an entire website that shows the format of every file with full details. I almost cried on how easy it was vs. how much hard I had to work.
When I was a kid in the 80s I wanted to write 3D games. The only way to find any information was going to libraries. I used to get my parents to drive me to all sorts of different towns just so I could rummage through their libraries hoping to find a computer book I could use!
Then the Internet arrived for me in 1993 and suddenly everything I needed was right there. I feel you!
I'm glad that era is gone. It took too long to learn. When I went to my cousins in Pakistan who had internet, he showed me Yahoo (google wasn't a thing yet) and the very first thing I searched for was File Formats, and there was an entire website that shows the format of every file with full details. I almost cried on how easy it was vs. how much hard I had to work.