Microsoft’s original source code

Microsoft (and maybe even Bill Gates personally) generated a strong "dislike" sentiment to the hacker community. But we can't deny that he and Paul Allen were pure breed hackers and helped a lot the development of technology. Of course, we all prefer OSS and we'd pick Linus (or insert OSS dev name here) 100 times over one of the "evil capitalists"/s, but nevertheless they have to be recognized.

Allen wrote an 8080 emulator on a time shared PDP-10 in order for Gates to write the assembly code that implemented a BASIC interpreter - complete with I/O and editor - for a sight-unseen system, all in 4 kilobytes. And it worked the first time it was run.

I've been in the industry for 30 years and I couldn't do all that without serious Googling (or AI help nowadays).

Doing it as 20-somethings in the mid 70s definitely qualifies them as pure breed hackers to me.

As a kid of the late 90s i feel like it was kinda unfair.

Back in the day (70s(?)80s) computers shipped with the programming language manual. All I got was a CDROM of ENCARTA and a slip to mail in for a restore set of MS DOS / WIN 3.1 diskettes(which was sorely needed I might add).

In the mid 70s you got a badly mimeographed copy of the schematics and a bag of parts.

In the late 70s to early 80s you got a programming manual, but you had to save your programs on cassette tapes.

In the late 80s, you got glossy manuals which showed you how to turn on the computer, hook up a printer and load a program from DOS.

In the early 90s, the manuals were plain paper, smaller, and had instructions on how to use a mouse, and explained what a window is. Plus the mail-ins.

Mid-90s (CD-ROM "multimedia machines") you got a sheet of paper which told you to load the interactive tutorial from the included CD.

Late 90s you got 5000 hours of AOL. Plus another CD filled with co-branded crapware like CorelDraw Lite for Dell.

2000s+ crapware pre-installed, driver CD and a warranty card.

So really, the time period with the included programming manual was just a few years. And mostly all you did is print Hello World over and over again on the screen. So don't be too jealous.