Boy. His book "Inside the IBM PC" was my first intro to really understanding how computers work and now I'm counting almost 20 years working as a software engineer. I think that book set me on this path because, IIRC, it talked about BASIC and might have had some programs printed in it and I typed them up in QBASIC. From that point on, I used QBASIC's help menus to teach myself how to program. I owe that man a debt of gratitude.
QBASIC also had two addictive games - nibble (the snake game) and gorilla. I progressed from these to Prince of Persia and later Doom.
Peter Norton’s books introduced me to the secrets of the PC. IIRC, he also had a book that explained how to do TSR (terminate, but stay resident) DOS programs.
Gorillas! I once spent a week with some friends in a house where we found an old computer with no games except QBASIC's. I don't remember why but I implemented "training mode" with only one gorilla shooting bananas. Probably a feature request by someone who didn't have school that week...
Yeah, TSR was definitely the kick-ass programming technique at the time because it DOS was so limited. The only way to pep it up was to install some TSR sidekicks. Writing these TSR sidekicks was difficult if one wants it to do it correctly because there was no official way to do all the hooking stuffs. I remember I wrote a small utility to make correct statistics about my working sections even when the computer crashed. There were days with 12 resets or even more(!) when I was writing a keyboard drivers!
Yeeh, it was such a good time.
