but those days of hacking ah I mean learning were quite fun .

I remember my first program that I "downloaded" from a friend. It was Donkey Kong. You could connect 300 baud with another color computer. We had a terminal program that allowed you to "type" back and forth once you established a connection. There was also a "capture" buffer. I would hit the hot key to start capturing the buffer. The other guy would send the file and it would flash across the screen as garbage. When bytes stopped sending, you would hit the hot key to close the capture buffer and you had the program.

Then BBS's started popping up and terminal programs got better download features.

We would "hack" the games too. For example, a game might only give you three guys to start with. We would dis-assemble the assembly lang and look for op codes where a value of 3 was loaded into a register. Then change that value to see if it affected the number of players you got. It was easy to figure out how to cheat the games and start with 255 guys.

Thanks for sharing your experiences. It's always fun to talk about those days. It was an exciting time to be a geek.