Infinite Code Monkey

From VIC to PC

After abusing the VIC-20 for a while, I started taking some classes at PCC (now WVU-P). After fixing one of Mom's FORTRAN programs and not ever having seen FORTRAN, she suggested that I might want to take some classes. So, I did. That was the beginning of the end. It was onto DEC/VAX systems. At some point in there, we got a PC-Jr. Now, I think it was a decent little computer. It got a bad rap because it was marketed as 'Jr' but it had some nice features! Wireless keyboard, 32 color graphics, 128 meg of memory. I got just as sucked into that system as I had the VIC. Being a major geek, I bought some books on Intel 8086 assembly language, some Peter Norton books on the guts of IBM DOS. And had at it. Most of the time I made weird pictures that moved and balls that bounced around on the screen and changed colors and other strange stuff.

While I was at PCC I discovered Pascal. What a huge revolution from BASIC! Holy crap, it was actually FAST! Well, except when I wrote those Fractalprograms that took all day to run. I had a lot to learn about writing efficient math code. Tweak and tune! But it made perty pictures.

Eventually, when working at DuPont, I dug into C programming and that was probably the biggest turning point in programming for me. It was the perfect combination of high level language, and low level control. The problem with C is that you can fuck up a computer like you won't believe in about, oh, 2 lines of code. Over the years, I moved to C++, then to C#, with some others along the way (Assm, Java, DCL, SQL, Visual Basic.) All of which got me here, writing Windows apps and doing all kinda fun interfaces and database apps and other funky stuff.

posted by Tony @ 12:13 PM