Back in the day access to knowledge was quite hard, everyone first started with random file dumps from BBS exchanges, then followed by books. After that if you were of the right age and lived in the right place you might have had access to a university library with papers.

Talking of knowledge and books: It was around 1995 or so and I was in my last year of high school. We went on a small field trip to a local computer show and only about 4-5 students in the whole school were interested in going, at that time computer science was still a very new topic over here in the 3rd world.

At the show I found a stall in a corner with some random hardware books and then this giant white tome about computer graphics. The size of it was intimidating and while scanning through it I saw some ridiculous mathematical formulas that I couldn't make head or tails of. But either way I had to have it and luckily I had gotten just enough money from my mom that I was able to buy it.

That was how I lucked into Computer Graphics - Principles and Practice (2nd Edition) which had just come out. That book was a literal gold mine of concentrated topics for a kid, I spent more time studying that book in the next year than I had done for all my high school subjects combined.

My deepest thanks to everyone who contributed to it, it's shown here on Fabien's page: https://fabiensanglard.net/Computer_Graphics_Principles_and_...

Not to ramble, but a funny addition to the story. The only compilers/languages I could find locally were DOS Basic and then Pascal with Assembly which I learned most of my programming skills in. I had heard of this magical C language that was so fast and all the games were now being made in it, but for probably 3 years I couldn't find a compiler for it anywhere.

Then randomly one day right around the Doom 1994 release date my uncle who had started working with hardware had been given a promotional Watcom C/C++ compiler which he gifted to me, and I could suddenly work with the same language and compiler that they had used! Of course it took me a bit of time to learn but by the time I got the CG Bible in 1995 I was set.