Comment by georgemcbay
4 days ago
Blog poster's early computing history is remarkably similar to mine in terms of years/ages.
Got a C64 (with a 1541 disk drive) around late 1983 (when I was 10). Hooked up to a 13 inch CRT TV at first.
Got into games, computer magazines, magazine game listings (like the ones from old Compute!'s Gazette), taught myself MS BASIC and 6502/6510 assembly language, got into cracking games, got a 300 baud 1650 modem, got into BBSes (warez, chat sites like old diversi-dial systems, etc), figured out (out of necessity and long before you could 'google it') how to manually realign my 1541 disk drive because of early game protection systems, eventually moved up to an Amiga 500, pirated a copy of SAS/C (then later used Matt Dillon's DICE), got into hacking (the other, less legal kind) at first via wardialing and eventually found my way into X.25 and the early pre-web internet (bitnet relay, early irc, usenet, etc).
Eventually became a legitimate software developer which I've been doing professionally since the mid 1990s (bounced back and forth between various forms of unix and win32 for years mostly using C/C++, then a lot of Go/Java/Kotlin/mobile/embedded) and still do it now as we're all slowly being replaced by large multidimensional arrays of floating point numbers.
Long, strange trip.
That very similar history is shared by us dinosaurs. I especially remember tuning the 1530 datasette to play differently recorded tapes, then moving to DOS and discovering how much faster it was to run something compiled by turbo pascal. Then discovering "infinite memory" since you could create a pointer pointing at a place in memory which had... another pointer!!! (I was a very happy kid after discovering that)
Who are you, and why are you writing my biography? Your journey was nearly identical to mine. I truly, sincerely feel like we went through a golden age, where amazing things were starting to become possible but you hard to work hard enough to get them that you couldn't help but learn something new along the way.
Yeah, if I were 10 now I'm not sure where I'd end up in terms of life/career, but it wouldn't look anything like my actual path, even adjusting for the obvious technological differences.
I'm fairly certain that computers to a 10 year old me in 2026 would be far less interesting than they were to actual 10 year old me in 1983.
The relative mystery they had around them then (assuming you weren't the kid of a turing award winner or some such, my parents were just normie folks) and seeking out the rare bits of written documentation held in a tiny dark corner at libraries, in tattered old used books, etc was like learning ancient, arcane magic knowledge and that was a lot of the allure for me.
Having instant access to most of the world's knowledge to answer any question you might have is objectively powerful, but just not nearly as fun as half-blindly intuiting your way through the dark weeds until deep understanding eventually just falls into place.
I was going to post something similar. I think the Amiga's CLI helped me ease into unix/Linux which is how I got my first programming job.
Same here. It clearly wasn't Unix, but it was a whole lot closer to Unix than MS-DOS was. All the basic concepts were there, and when I eventually migrated into a Linux environment it all felt familiar.
May your trip continue!
At 15 in 1980, I couldn't afford a computer - but I could afford the books and manuals. So like Ada Lovelace before me, I did all my programming in my head.
Disk drive luxury, all I had was the tape deck. On the upside I got a lot of reading done while waiting for game to load.
> Disk drive luxury, all I had was the tape deck.
A friend's father had an incredible stereo-stack, full Nakamishi stuff. We tried hard to copy C64 tapes of commercial games using his stereo gear but got nowhere: I was maybe 12 years old or so.
Eventually noticed (through a window) the neighbors also had a C64, but with a floppy disk drive: so my mom pushed us to dare go ring the bell next door and present ourselves and ask for help. They showed next day at our place with... Their 1541 floppy disk drive and 200 floppies. They explained my mom it'd be much easier if she were to buy me a floppy disk drive...
We're still friends to this day and exchange Telegram messages on a near daily basis.
Yeah, I was lucky enough to miss the "Datasette" days.
I had the luxury of a disk drive, and even eventually had an Epyx Fast Load cartridge to speed (some) things up even further! Practically zooming for the time!
The C64 disk drive would still have left you with plenty of reading time.
Yeah the bug in the hardware for the disk drive was a bummer. It was supposed to be 4-5 times faster but due to the hardware bug it shipped with a slow workaround. Its kind of amazing that you allow it to ship like that.