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Subscribe24 Oct
A Friday Meme: How did you get started?
This may well have been done before, who knows, but I came across a great question on Stack Overflow: how did you get started in computing?
My dad bought lots of the specy mags, and somewhere in the mid 80s, he sat me down in the office (read: shoe box bedroom) with several pages of BASIC for a Star Wars game. I recall spending at least 4 hours typing away a ZX Spectrum, key by key, reams of BASIC until I was finally finished.
Did it run? Hell no! Probably an Invalid argument or Variable not found, who knows! Although it was great experience (in beginning) to learn to touch type.
How did you get in to this business?
You should follow me on Twitter here I'll tweet about JavaScript, HTML 5 and other such gems (amongst usual tweet-splurges)
Introducing HTML5%7Cutmcsr%3D(direct)%7Cutmcmd%3D(none)%3B%2B__utmv%3D12328258.-%3B)
I went along to the "computer room" for "computer club" when I first started high school. I'd seen these computer things on the telly and equated computers with video games. Played a crappy football game on a RM380Z and though it was the nuts.
Managed to persuade my parents to buy me a ZX81 but in the shop I managed to talk them into buying a 16Kb Speccy and it went from there.
Apart from a dry spell during my late teens where I was more concerned with drinking, girls, guitars and the Playstation I bought a PC with money from selling my Halifax shares. A Pentium 233Mhz MMX with 64Mb RAM. I still have it actually though it's now overclocked to 266Mhz (feel the power) and has 512Mb RAM and Win98.
I should have added, Spectrums were my dad's purchase, and we had one version of a speccy throughout the 80s. Then around the early 90s (I think) he bought me a PC (well, got it as a hand-me-down from work): 8Mb RAM, dual speed 8Khz to 16Khz PC. I think the hardrive was 40Mb. Frickin' awesome!
On my side i had a kind of rich neighbor that appeared with an Atari 800XL in the mid 80's... after i saw it i felt immediately in love, and i saved money (with my great grand ma) for 2 years to get one.
And while my friend was only playing with it, i started to learn BASIC. At the end i had even a floppy disc drive and a printer and wrote a 300K (more than 1 floppy!!) spaghetti program with a sort of DB for helping my mom's business... really great times...
Great question! My grandfather bought an IBM clone in '84(?) and soon thereafter opened a small computer repair shop. I bought a duel 5 1/4 floppy IBM clone from him and wrote all my school papers on it. I'll never forget the day when I upgraded to a 20mb HDD! Booting up without inserting a boot disc was such a nice luxury. I had the worst dot matrix printer too! If i ever left it unattended, it would inevitably get stuck and print the entire document on one line, creating a solid black bar of ink!
Similar story - dad worked with pcs in the early - mid 80s. He brought one home (286 I think it was), I started playing around with good old GWBasic, then later QBasic. Remember having mouse input coded using assembly hardware interrupts, and writing a game where you shot bottles off a fence using the mouse cursor - one of my proudest achievements!! Then sound blaster coding, one of the coolest things ever, suddenly pcs could play back non-midi music.
Having to rejig all of your mem and extended mem settings in your autoexec.bat and config.sys everytime you wanted to play the latest game, squeezing out every last drop of performance.
Getting Kings Quest 6 for Xmas having to wait an hour for it install from its ten 5 1/4 floppies!
Good times