I like hearing stories about how people got into computers and programming. Perhaps if I blog my story, you’ll share yours. — Thanks to @scottha for his getting started on computers post and inspiring this post.
My Dad was constantly working on creating new electronics gizmos as a side job. He had a classic IBM PC XT he’s use to program his microcontrollers. Well one day when I was about 6 yrs old he upgraded to a 286 and put the XT in the common room. I was curious and poked around at the games on it like Castle Adventure, Sopwith, Paratrooper, Bouncing Babies, and Digger. The games just didn’t hold my interest so our local librarian handed me a really simple Learn BASIC book and I was hooked.
Writing apps was awesome! While friends were playing games or making little apps with graphics I was more interested in disk I/O and databases. From there moved on to using QuickBASIC (Microsoft’s ‘professional basic’) and eventually Visual Basic for DOS (VBDOS, yes, it existed). My early days involved writing and selling some shareware apps, entering assembly from PC magazines to create new DOS utilities, running a RemoteAccess BBS, creating ASCII graphics w TheDraw, and I won a TX state programming competition and wrote serial port interface apps for my Dad’s electronics.
In the end I think it was just the un-engaging nature (at least for me) of those first DOS games that sparked the interest in doing more with the computer. To this day I try new games every few months, but rarely do they hold more than a few hours interest before I turn back to coding. (p.s. there were some later exceptions, a few games that got me hooked, Startflight 2 being the first, gosh I loved that game)
Thanks to Dad for giving me the hand me downs, keeping me updated with better IDEs, and engaging me on his projects. And thanks to our dear librarian for handing me an awesome book on programming.
What’s your story?
I remember my first awesome computer was a hand-me-down from my uncle Daryl. It was a 400mhz Pentium something, with a Voodoo 2 graphics card. The 2D and 3D accelerator cards ran in separate PCI slots, and they had this little ribbon cable that went between them. Games of my childhood were Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, Unreal Tournament, and Age of Empires. In 3D! The hottest thing since color!
When I got (dialup) Internet, my world opened up. I remember making my first website in Paint and Frontpage. It was an awful-looking thing fit for Geocities, and I remember how frustrated I was that I couldn’t make it “look right” like the other websites I saw. There were self-taught curriculum classes in my middle school on Adobe Dreamweaver, so I hit the books and started playing with plugins, flash toolbars, midi files and animated gifs. The first site I was proud of was a little collection I made of different flash games from around the net. I still remember the flaming text gif I used in the header. “Designed for Netscape 4.0 and greater” lol!
In high school, I became an HTML virtuoso. I fearlessly created code from scratch, shooing away wysiwyg creators as if they were kiddy toys. I started learning how to photoshop with style. My graphics finally “looked right”. I was on the SkillsUSA Web Design team on my high school, and I placed 2nd in the district competitions. After that, I started freelancing for business owners I met in the local coffee shop. It’s fun to look back at my old work. I laugh when I see that my 5 year old code is still valid, that it works on iphones, and that it still has great style that doesn’t look dated. I smile to myself when facebook digests the links, and presents the little descriptions and the little thumbnail images in a way that looks flawless. It’s those little details that make me feel like I’m an accomplished designer.
I think in the end, making websites felt like breathing life into a business. It was like building a skyscraper on the net: a pillar of professionalism for even the smallest of businesses. It allowed me to see every detail of a business as I wrote the verbiage: how it ran, how it ticked, how it could be made better. It allowed me to share in the business owner’s dreams, and help them reach it by putting marketing to their ideas. It allowed me to peer into the minds of the customers, as I worked to feed them the information they craved without the extra junk they didn’t. It gave me an interconnected view of the world, that made me look past the small Texas towns I was living in. It was an escape that took me places and gave me a career.
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