I didn't know that until about a decade later, unfortunately!
People forget that in 1984 information wasn't a click away.
The problem with owning a Hong Kong-made 286 clone in 1984, and using pirated software, is that it was extremely hard to learn things. I was limited by the books at my local "Waldenbooks" computer section, which was about 20 books. Computer shopper and Byte magazine were kinda helpful, but I learned very, very slowly. It wasn't until I entered college that I started learning rapidly, but the focus wasn't on PCs (it was still MTS mainframes). It took until my first job writing 16-bit drivers that I finally started learning the nuts and bolts of MSDOS.
People forget that in 1984 information wasn't a click away.
The problem with owning a Hong Kong-made 286 clone in 1984, and using pirated software, is that it was extremely hard to learn things. I was limited by the books at my local "Waldenbooks" computer section, which was about 20 books. Computer shopper and Byte magazine were kinda helpful, but I learned very, very slowly. It wasn't until I entered college that I started learning rapidly, but the focus wasn't on PCs (it was still MTS mainframes). It took until my first job writing 16-bit drivers that I finally started learning the nuts and bolts of MSDOS.