It was back in 1991 when my first computer arrived at home. At the age of 10, I was really excited and proud for my new hard-earned 80386 microprocessor, at 8/16(turbo) MHz, with 1 MB of RAM, 40 MB hard disk drive and full-color VGA screen!
I still had not a clue about what was the potential of this great tool, but I surely knew well that I could play some fancy games.
I remember my first technical books were about MS-DOS and GW-BASIC.
I remember my first contact with the operating system shell. I managed to find out how to change directory and go straight to the games folder (cd games). The first disappointment came out when I couldn’t figure out how to change directory stepping out of the current directory. Then I always had to restart the whole computer using the reset button, so, it reloads the operating system. Then I could start over from the root directory, changing directories diving one-way deeper in the directory structure… And then restart again. The end of this series of psychological test sessions ended when I discovered “cd ..”, “cd /”, absolute and relative paths.
I remember myself trying to copy my first programming example, from my first programming book. It was a good reference guide to GW-BASIC. One of its first example code listings was an if-statement, a decision flow example, that would read a number from keyboard and then check if this number is negative or not. Finally, it would print-out jubilantly an appropriately happy message: “This number is positive/negative”. I was reading the book and I was excited by the fact that I could put some logic into a machine. Then this machine would execute my logic and it would react in some manner. I couldn’t wait to type it and put it in some serious testing… but when I started typing, this strange machine replied that this was a “Bad command or file name”. I was not sure about the “file name”, but I knew that the “commands” I was typing were absolutely identical with the commands on the book. The mystery was unveiled when I got the enlightenment of the GW-BASIC compiler and editor existence.
I remember my first computer game. It was something open source software, written in QuickBasic. It's the well known Gorilla. An old time classic. Two gorillas (two king-kongs actually) on the roofs of skyscrappers in a big city, throwing explosive bananas to each other. As a turn based, two player game we could also play against the computer. To run this game, I had to execute QuickBasic editor-compiler, load the source code file named gorilla.bas and then compile and run it from there. Sometimes I tried to read parts of code, but it was really disappointing.
I still had not a clue about what was the potential of this great tool, but I surely knew well that I could play some fancy games.
I remember my first technical books were about MS-DOS and GW-BASIC.
I remember my first contact with the operating system shell. I managed to find out how to change directory and go straight to the games folder (cd games). The first disappointment came out when I couldn’t figure out how to change directory stepping out of the current directory. Then I always had to restart the whole computer using the reset button, so, it reloads the operating system. Then I could start over from the root directory, changing directories diving one-way deeper in the directory structure… And then restart again. The end of this series of psychological test sessions ended when I discovered “cd ..”, “cd /”, absolute and relative paths.
I remember myself trying to copy my first programming example, from my first programming book. It was a good reference guide to GW-BASIC. One of its first example code listings was an if-statement, a decision flow example, that would read a number from keyboard and then check if this number is negative or not. Finally, it would print-out jubilantly an appropriately happy message: “This number is positive/negative”. I was reading the book and I was excited by the fact that I could put some logic into a machine. Then this machine would execute my logic and it would react in some manner. I couldn’t wait to type it and put it in some serious testing… but when I started typing, this strange machine replied that this was a “Bad command or file name”. I was not sure about the “file name”, but I knew that the “commands” I was typing were absolutely identical with the commands on the book. The mystery was unveiled when I got the enlightenment of the GW-BASIC compiler and editor existence.
I remember my first computer game. It was something open source software, written in QuickBasic. It's the well known Gorilla. An old time classic. Two gorillas (two king-kongs actually) on the roofs of skyscrappers in a big city, throwing explosive bananas to each other. As a turn based, two player game we could also play against the computer. To run this game, I had to execute QuickBasic editor-compiler, load the source code file named gorilla.bas and then compile and run it from there. Sometimes I tried to read parts of code, but it was really disappointing.
