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RE: Witness Update - lukestokes.mhth - October 26th, 2017
I watched the video. You started programmining in 1996? You would have still been a teenager, I think?
Unfortunately, we didn’t have computers when I was a boy. I got my first computer in 1985 when I was 28. It was an IBM PC. Green and black screen, no hard drive, no mouse, no USBs, no graphics, 64k ram - that I upgraded to the max of 256k.
Of course there was no internet or WWW in those days. Software and data moved by physically carrying a 5.25” floppy disk to another location.
I bought the PC second-hand. There were no shops in my country selling new computers. It cost me CHF 5000 including MS DOS. Back then the exchange rate was around $1 = CHF2.80. Today the dollar is worth much less. It’s now $1 = CHF 0.99.
Yeah, I was in high school making websites for my friends. Not sure if JavaScript rollovers and such count as "programming" but I was learning a ton and having fun. By the time I was in college, I was running my own apache server with mysql and a PHP guestbook (remember those?) I wrote myself. It was fun. During the dot com craze, I had companies I had worked for during the summers try to convince to not to go back to college by stay and work with them. I'm glad I finished school. :)
That's a lot of money for a computer. Dang. Thankfully, my dad was a database programmer who worked from home so we always had computers around and I think I learned about database design just sitting on his lap as a kid where'd he'd explain stuff to me.
No websites in 1985! I was an expert in every MS Dos command. You wouldn’t believe the things I could do in an autoexec.bat file (For the uninitiated, autoexec.bat was a small file that ran a series of commands when the computer booted up). When Lotus123 appeared I knew every command and could write macros with my eyes closed. Computers are getting so cheap these days, they will soon be giving them away. (Maybe not Apple). Until 2009 I was 100% PC. Then I bought an iPhone.... then an iMac.... My PCs started to gather dust. Now I am 100% Apple. Oh the irony of being in the control of the largest company on the planet, yet loving them to death.
Ah yeah, I use to have some fun with autoexec.bat as well. My buddies and I would have LAN parties late into the night playing quake 1 and whatever else we could find. Our first networks used BNC cables. If one person had to go home, we all had to stop are game as the whole network would go down if someone disconnected. Those were the days. :)
The first of us to get a "real" job got hired by IBM so he went to Fry's electronics and got a 10/100 switch. We all bought new network cards and felt like gods transferring files and mp3s around. It was pretty sweet. :)
Those were the days!