Old Tech Stories
I've happened to read a couple of posts about people reminiscing how they got started with computers way back. I'm talking DOS in the 80s and prior to that. I thought it was very interesting, I've heard many stories of punch cards and mainframes (I've actually worked at a company that made screen scraping software for 3270 and other mainframes alike) and I though it'd be cool to share some stories.
As for my story, it all started when my dad bought an Apple IIe when I was 6 or 7 years old. I remember trying to program a mini-putt game I had seen at an arcade (I should try to find the game now) but I think the farthest I got was drawing the outline or the course (I don't even know what that programming language was). I must have been about 10-11 years old at the time. I had a knack for math as a young child, my parent actually got me into Logo programming (remember the turtle?), my teacher had asked me to make a circle and I was making octagons... lol. Later on when we got our first IBM PC (386, 25MHz), I got into QBasic and GWBasic, I didn't even know you could make functions at the time. In my first year of high school (13 years old), I remember asking my computer teacher how to increment a value, before that, I would do y = x + 1, x = y or something stupid like that.
For me, the whole VR thing really started with 3D, my first encounter was with stereograms my family had discovered during a trip to Niagara Falls, they were the thing when they first came out, they were everywhere. I actually had found out how to make my own in QBasic, let's just say my software wasn't very fast or efficient, it would take about a minute to draw out a 200x150 pixels image. Today I'm a big fan of anything 3D, from movies to cameras to gaming, I used to own a few pairs of shutter glasses for PC gaming, I was really sad to see LCD monitors take the market as they weren't compatible with the glasses. I made sure to keep one old monitor around for gaming. Thanks NVidia for making the stereoscopic drivers!
Have fun guessing my age, that shouldn't be too hard.
Post your stories too, I wanna read them!
As for my story, it all started when my dad bought an Apple IIe when I was 6 or 7 years old. I remember trying to program a mini-putt game I had seen at an arcade (I should try to find the game now) but I think the farthest I got was drawing the outline or the course (I don't even know what that programming language was). I must have been about 10-11 years old at the time. I had a knack for math as a young child, my parent actually got me into Logo programming (remember the turtle?), my teacher had asked me to make a circle and I was making octagons... lol. Later on when we got our first IBM PC (386, 25MHz), I got into QBasic and GWBasic, I didn't even know you could make functions at the time. In my first year of high school (13 years old), I remember asking my computer teacher how to increment a value, before that, I would do y = x + 1, x = y or something stupid like that.
For me, the whole VR thing really started with 3D, my first encounter was with stereograms my family had discovered during a trip to Niagara Falls, they were the thing when they first came out, they were everywhere. I actually had found out how to make my own in QBasic, let's just say my software wasn't very fast or efficient, it would take about a minute to draw out a 200x150 pixels image. Today I'm a big fan of anything 3D, from movies to cameras to gaming, I used to own a few pairs of shutter glasses for PC gaming, I was really sad to see LCD monitors take the market as they weren't compatible with the glasses. I made sure to keep one old monitor around for gaming. Thanks NVidia for making the stereoscopic drivers!
Have fun guessing my age, that shouldn't be too hard.
Post your stories too, I wanna read them!
