The shareware modell was the only that worked in those days. Because to get a publisher for mac was almost impossible.

With modems1987  and zterm you could enter to a bbs and download software. You needed the number and of course a computer on the other side. So this bullet boards system where dial in systems. from time to time the mother of a guy took the phone .-) 

You only used this in the ‘phone cheap time’ - >21.00. A game for Amiga or Atari ST was 900kb - the modem was about 3600-12200 bauds. you waited very long from time to time.

The listing culture is a hybrid between gutenberg galaxis and software. Software was often distributed in the mainframe time as source code ( c ). each system had a different set of hardware, processor. c and co were the platform. You could compile it for your system. 

The listing culture brought source code to the magazines and could be published. first with basic and co for homecomputers, later with checksums, than basic with assembler inlines, than only shortcodes. 

of course by typing in you could learn how to code and solve problems.

First developing on Atari ST (Assembler) but never published something except a demo for a bbs 1993 (First founded by two brothers). First not released ‘product’. A listing game for Happy Computer. 
Than switched to Macintosh (1995 ). Games in C . And than published over the net (website) or in Maganzines Disc-Magazines as Shareware. Paid first with checkes (almost impossible to get the money for 15$ games), so switched to real money and than to KAGI.com a first worldwide payment service.

Inbetween the author worked produced Flash-Games for advertising and ported a lot of games for Java (Applets) 1996 . 

Afterwards switched to Objective-C on MacOSX with a new name: la1n.ch. 

Mostly by announcing it on usenet. That had a tight-knit community of Amiga programmers that was easy to reach. Then on Fish disks and Aminet as well. At some point, print magazines started to cover it with courses etc, and I got invited to speak at conferences about it.

It got fairly popular, to the point where at some point a popularity poll was held somewhere on the internets, and E came in second after C/C , but before Pascal and Basic. Probably a biased sample, but still :)

Hah, I might not be the best to explain Amiga history, but I’ll do my best :) Fish disks were the main way to distribute public domain, open source, shareware etc. before the internet was wide-spread. People would send Fred Fish software, and he’d compile them into individual disks that people would copy. Magazines would have lots of companies that would allow you to order copies of these disks etc. He ended up creating over a 1000 disks this way. When cd-roms became a thing, you could order the whole collection on those. Those were strange times :)

Aminet was the most famous ftp-archive for amiga software. It was run by the same guy that made Brainfuck, Urban Müller. Rather than chronologically like fish disks, it was organized by topic, with readme’s for every file. You could upload to a staging area, and he’d put them in place. Much like fish disks, companies would print cd-roms with the latest from aminet for those not hooked up to the internets (or on 56k modems, which was most people).

People would send Fred Fish software, and he’d compile them into individual disks that people would copy. Magazines would have lots of companies that would allow you to order copies of these disks etc. He ended up creating over a 1000 disks this way. When cd-roms became a thing, you could order the whole collection on those. Those were strange times :)

Computerclubs were a very important institution. 

0. Is a place and a community in the same and also a public in the same
1. Networking people in a non internet time.
2. Bringing KnowhHow to people (Courses)
3. Showing, Selling Hardware (Internally)
4. Own public magazines
5. Part of Creating Groups/interested people
6. Only available in bigger towns 

la1n was the direct next step from imp89. New maschines and a new platform macosx. “Therefore i learned objective-c and coded real object orientated” and switched now to 3d games with opengl. The games were now more an more like gameengines and were object-orientated. But still hardcore coded. This change with the upcoming game engine like torque or unity. 

Therefore the last games from la1n.ch till now were again hardcore coded games like axe (atari 2600 vcs), vecZ (vectrex 2016). 

GameDevs are gamedeveloppers. The name tells also a lot about the idea behind. The most important thing was the technical difficulties. 

check: was this really every online?

atronic.ch