About 15 years ago I touched a computer for the first time in my life. I was 6 years old, and the computer was running Pac Man. I wasn’t very good, I thought the aim of the game was to run into the ghosts and my game playing abilities obviously haven’t improved much. However computers would go on to have a major impact in my life.

I learnt to read because of computers, well more because of a game. My parents had decided that I wasn’t allowed to play Civilization until I could read the Civilization manual. For those who’ve never seen manuals of the era, the Civilization manual was a hefty tomb, about a centimeter thick similar in page size to a National Geographic except with the seam along the skinnier edge.It contained a wealth of knowledge on the history of the civilizations included in the game, and why each of the technologies were important and responsible for our current society.

Once again my inability to comprehend what was going on came into light. The Settler units I thought were representing bugs, same as in Captain Comic below. Though perhaps I can be forgiven for not recognizing them as I hadn’t covered American history by then.

Also for anyone complaining about patches today. The mouse didn’t work in the first release of Civilization but since the internet wasn’t exactly readily available most people did not have access to the patch. I use to play that game entirely with the keyboard. Then again we didn’t own a mouse until later so I suppose I wasn’t missing much.

So I played a lot of games for the next few years, until something happened that made probably the single biggest impact in my life. A VTech Pre Computer 1000 came into my possession.

Incredible isn’t it? And it classy blue as well. Although it might not look like much, it packs something truely amazing. A BASIC interpreter. While studying the manual for the computer I saw the “Hello World” example and gave it a ago. Programming for the PC 1000 was truly awful. It had a 20 character line display and no permanent storage capacity. So all programs I wrote had to be carefully written out on paper and copied over. Often they wouldn’t work, but occasionally I’d manage to create something that ran as intended. I can also remember that my second program ever for it consisted entirely of REM statements and a comment saying I was trying to write image editing software. Obviously this never came into fruition stifled by the lack of graphical output other than characters and other inherent limitations with the platform.

But still, for the next few years I read everything I could on programming. Not that I understood any of it, even the library’s copy of how to avoid the Y2k bug, written during the late 80s was poured over. It consisted of examples in C, Pascal and x86 assembly, none of which I understood, but still I read.

Later on when I was 13 I was given a pirated copy of Visual Basic 5, which to me meant the world. It could compile stuff that would work on a REAL computer. You have to realise I didn’t have access to the internet, I didn’t goto school and I didn’t have the financial means to purchase my own compiler to write my own software. To make matters more fun the pirated copy of VB5 nuked my registry, such that the common control dialogue control was incorrectly registered so I couldn’t use it. Which mean I had no easy way in the drag and drop IDE to make open/save boxes.

So I read the Win32 API. No documentation, just trying random things and hopeing my computer didn’t crash. About a year later I’d figured out how to make an open dialogue box, along with BitBLT and Keyboard input. I had a really terrible space invaders clone running. Then the next important thing happened. I gained access to the internet. All of a sudden I had access to most of the resources everyone else had and could upload what I was working on. Pyrosoftware was born a year later, someone gave me VB6 and I worked on trying to sell what I was working on.

I never made much money, but I did break even with my webhosting bills and received postcards from around the world thanking me for pieces of software that I’d written to fix things that were annoying me.

I did write some cool software though (and a lot of crap [why on earth did I write an ASCII art editor?]):

The Microsoft documentation for the External object sucks. It took me about a week to get the mass image downloader working for Mike. It downloads all the images on a page without prompts and automatically renames them. I got paid for this one, I think 10USD, but to me that was a LOT of money back then.

Taylor’s still bitching at me for a new version of Spike :P One day I’ll get around to writing a new C# version for him. It’s to my great annoyance that I can’t port my syntax parsing calculator though over to C#, since I can’t figure out how on earth I got it to work, looks like I’ll have to write a new one.

The PyroDVD plugin for Winamp. One and half years of work on my behalf. It automatically loads your currently selected Winamp 2 skin and reskins itself! It also plays DVDs. I didn’t get the window to “jump” to the Winamp windows though. I think this screenshot was taken about 2 months before I started uni.

I was panicing by now. I’d made up my mind to take Computer Science at the University of Auckland, and I thought that everyone had studied so much more than me. Ask Andie if you don’t believe me. In fact I was so keen to start that I turned upto my first CompSci lecture, CompSci 101 in summer school in 2005 over 25 hours early (mainly cause I got the day that uni started wrong).

Three years of partying - playing dota- later I’m still here at uni. Except there’s some crazy people who think I might know something now.

Computers still mean heaps to me. They still annoy me, and don’t do exactly what I want them to do, but I’m still doing my best to fix this as I’ve done for many years.

Has anything really changed? I’m typing this up on a laptop that has 4000 times the amount of ram my first computer did. It has over 500 times the processing power. And a 1000 times the storage space. Even my router completely outclasses my first computer. But guess what, Pacman still runs on this laptop (and I still suck at it).

Link of the day: PLT1 Tower Defence Scoreboard