Good times, playing nibbles / gorillas with my siblings. I never got into programming as an adult, but I got quite into making stuff with QBasic as a kid. We used to make very annoying programs to take to school and unleash upon the poor beleagured IT department.
The very first code pre-teen me wrote was in QuickBasic a thousand years ago.
Core memory unlocked.
I remember changing values in gorillas.bas as a kid to make the bananas go faster or slower or changing the sky from blue to red. I thought I was a little hacker man for sure.
QBasic kinda fucked me later in life though when I had to basically unlearn all the shit programming techniques I picked up on it when learning C++.
I learnt to code in 1984 on my MSX which came with Microsoft MSX Basic.
We had the computer because my grandpa was into tech and bought new computers all the time. He gave my parents the computer and because my room was the only one with a bit of space, it came to sit on my desk. We had a couple of games for it on cartridge, but they were kinda lame.
One day by accident I stumbled upon the MSX Basic interface and didn’t know what I was looking at. I asked my dad and he didn’t really know anything about it, but remembered my grandpa also gave us a book with the computer. The book was about learning Basic and because computers were a new thing at the time, it was written in a way that made it easy to understand. I asked my dad what you could actually do with Basic, he didn’t know but it had something to do with telling the computer what it should do. So I said: “Could you create games with it?” He said: “Sure, I guess?”.
My little goblin mind freaked out, something that would allow new games! The games we had were lame so I really wanted new games. So I spent thousands of hours learning everything I could about that machine, Basic and coding in general. My grandpa gave me lots of books and I learned all the hardware and the assembly etc. I made a lot of games over the years, some good, most bad and made my siblings play them. We still remember some of them and joke about it. Especially because one of my brothers specialized in finding ways to cheat and exploit my games, which was tons of fun.
Later in life I studied to become an Embedded System Engineer because I really like the low-level programming side and the hardware aspect. Also the gaming industry sucks to work in, so I’ll pass on that. Maybe some day I’ll create another game as a passion project, but life gets in the way at the moment.
A few months ago I was tasked with translating a script from one IBM emulator program to another because the owners of the first program wouldn’t respond to requests to purchase a new license.
The scripting language used on both was unique to the software, and the documentation was basically non-existent. Plus, the script was written over a decade ago, and the guy who wrote it was long gone.
For weeks I banged my head against the wall trying to figure out the logic flow before I realized that it was essentially BASIC, which I haven’t touched in over 20 years.
This was, also, my first programming language ever. Oh the memories of typing it in from one of those books on the one computer we had in our classroom…
I wasn’t here for this, but my first exposure was when my uncle showed me BASICA on Windows 98. Then I started playing around with VB 6. The rest was history.
Now I am a full-time backend engineer mostly doing Python & Linux programming. Not sure where I’d end up otherwise.
