it was fun at the time, though information was limited and precious, you ended up being very dependent on books and magazines to find out about how to get things done.
Crazy times. A null pointer reference used to cause a full computer reboot. You had to read your printf logs to find where approximately the program stopped.
I spent a sizeable amount of my scholarship money on Microsoft Systems Journals, Charles Petzolds "Programming Windows" and "Undocumented Windows". The latter would teach you tricks like saving the Window position in an INI file so you could make it reappear in the same place where it was closed...
It was very funny making Dialogs with a randomly moving "OK" button responding on WM_MOUSEOVER (or something like it). Make them bigger, toolboxes, always on-top, and disable the top-right "x" button. Fun times :P
On discovering that buttons and other controls were just different classes of windows, I wrote a few little games that took advantage of it to spawn moving buttons, checkboxes, and other widgets. Their sources and binaries are probably still somewhere, but not currently on this computer. Incidentally, I believe Minesweeper also does the same with its grid --- they're just buttons.
it was fun at the time, though information was limited and precious, you ended up being very dependent on books and magazines to find out about how to get things done.