You can not select more than 25 topics
Topics must start with a letter or number, can include dashes ('-') and can be up to 35 characters long.
31 lines
3.8 KiB
31 lines
3.8 KiB
# The Kid With a Passion
|
|
|
|
This is one of my most common and one of my favorite stories to tell. How the world came to receive the upbringing of a legendary computer programmer.
|
|
|
|
## Video Games
|
|
|
|
As a child I was heavily influenced by my Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) and Game Boy Color (GBC). These two systems were the bread and butter of my interactions with video games. I would play classics like Pokemon Red, Earthbound, Super Mario World; and even dive into the original Playstation 1 with the classical Final Fantasy VII. But one of the big mysteries that I wanted to solve was: **How do these games work??**
|
|
|
|
The question quickly began haunting my 10-year old mind and my curiosity got me to ask my parents, my grandparents: "How does it work?" Of course, at that time very few people in the world were familiar with the intricacies of computer programming and electronics. And my relatives did not possess the knowledge to answer this question. I would let it linger for quite some time...
|
|
|
|
## First Encounter
|
|
|
|
My first encounter with a computer was at my grandparents' home. It was a Windows 95 system and at times I could connect through Walmart Connect's Dial-up Internet Service! I didn't have much use for the Internet at the time as there wasn't much on it... Or so I thought. What I did find interesting though were the hard drive partitions. The system was formatted into 5 separate partitions each consisting of about 1 GB each. Except for one... Well, it **was** indeed 1 GB. But it was full of, junk. Oh yeah, "Junk". I bet you know where this is going.
|
|
|
|
I noticed a large number of files were found inside the Windows/System folder. So I decided to **do a favor** and free up some space. As a 10-year old child this made perfect sense. I clicked around and noticed they didn't do anything. Surely these could be removed! As one might expect, on the next reboot the computer wouldn't boot and was asking to insert a boot disk.
|
|
|
|
At this point, I reviewed the actions I've taken in my head and concluded that I had broke it.
|
|
|
|
Luckily one of my grandparent's neighbors who was the original owner of that PC had a *pretty good idea* of what I had done. And they were computer-literate, managing to reinstall another copy of Windows 95 using a whole bunch of floppy discs. It was pretty obvious why my grandparents wouldn't let me near the computer again for quite some time.
|
|
|
|
## Experimentation
|
|
|
|
Back at my parents' home we had a Windows 95 computer (and my father had an almighty Windows 98 computer) and you bet that I would want to experiment more on that thing with the knowledge I've obtained previously. There was a neighbor friend I had met who told me about this wonderful kids site called "Neopets". And demonstrated it to me by showing me the games and their Neopets. I definitely joined in the fun, creating my account and playing daily. It was a fun interactive click and play experience for the time and gave me reasons to stick around on the Internet.
|
|
|
|
## Slowness
|
|
|
|
What really started to annoy me about the Internet was how slow the connection was. Downloading at only 1kb/s, sometimes 2kb/s on good days how was anyone supposed to download a 1.5MB game you wanted from the Internet in a reasonable time? You didn't, it took hours. And in the hours it took to download some of the Internet games I wanted to explore I decided on something new, some thing big brain. Something that I did not realize was going to change my life forever.
|
|
|
|
**What if, instead of downloading games I download something that makes games and make something in the same amount of time it takes me to download said game?**
|
|
|
|
The ultimate reason I got into computer programming was because there was a problem: The Internet was too slow to download games, and the solution was to make my own. Little did I know that making games was going to become an addicting hobby that would last a lifetime....
|
|
|