Comment by tdicola
12 years ago
Oh wow, I was thinking of writing a very similar post too. Denthor's tutorials were one of my first introductions to programming, and I too fondly remember typing them all into Turbo Pascal and trying to understand exactly what they did. I've always wondered what Denthor / Grant Smith was up to in the years after the tutorials, and if he ever thought about how many people he might have helped get interested in programming.
If anyone's curious you can actually find Denthor's tutorials here: http://textfiles.com/programming/astrainer.txt
I also searched around a bit and found this good thread that seems to indicate Denthor is doing well these days and lives in England with a family: http://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=7530&page=1
Denthor, or Grant Smith, went on to build one of the world's first online casinos. He did this with his brother, Dean (I think), in the city of Durban, South Africa. They were tremendously successful and sold their business to a company called Microgaming, who are now the largest privately-owned gaming software company in the world.
Apparently Grant still works for Microgaming but does so for fun, as one of the conditions of the sale was a profit share in all future earnings. His brother Dean retired and is travelling the world.
So, sounds like Grant did OK :)
That's an incredible story! He's touched so many lives and I'm so glad he is happy and found his riches. If he ever was in Melbourne, I'd be the first to buy him a beer :)
Theses tutorials had also been a very important step in my life. I found Denthor's words in a collection of pirated softwares. This was different, this was knowledge given for free and the results were astonishing. It was my first encounter with shared knowledge.
I may have never dedicated my life to open source without denthor/asphixia.
It was the proof of code creativity and that great things could be done by sharing. This was a new way of creating art. A new way of defining cultural exchanges around art, with an open mind.
Infinite thanks.
So say we all.
When I was a kid, I spent a huge amount of time reading everything I could find in the msdos programming archives on x2ftp.oulu.fi: ftp://ftp.lanet.lv/pub/programming/mirror-x2ftp/
Denthor's tutorials were also included in the "PC Game Programmer's Encyclopedia" (also on that site) which collected many useful documents. I had been programming for a while, but Denthor's tutorials were among the first that allowed me to go beyond simple text adventures and graphics with the BGI (Borland Graphics Interface!).
All that stuff had a profound effect on me; not just the technical information, but the idea of communicating that information for free in a way that was comprehensible to novices.
PC Game Programmer's Encyclopedia! Now that was awesome resource :)
With that and Ralf Brown's Interrupt List, you were Superman.
Oh yeah, I loved that FTP site! It was one of the only internet addresses I had memorized by heart.
There were also a ton of stuff on xs4all.nl
Now I'm a bit sad that I don't have a comment system on my blog. It would be awesome to collect these stories!
You could write a post with a collection of these stories and a request for more :).
I found a work around - I added a link to this discussion at the end of the post. My work here is done :)