About Me
I did originally write a lengthy story on how I got into computers a long time ago for a previous incarnation of this site, but it seems I can’t actually find it. It probably got nuked when my primary harddrive squelched all those years ago. Because I can’t exactly remember it all, and it would take ages to write anyway, I’m just going to jump in at when I actually started to program.
Please note that the writing of this article will be an on-going process, so please check back for updates. I’ll probably mention the updates on the main page or something, so whatever.
1993. Thirteen years old. An Amiga1200 owner.
Essentially being the ”pre-internet” period, the only real way of getting information on your favourite subject was to buy a magazine, as opposed to just throwing words at your search engine of choice and browsing through the results. My favourite – family orientated – subject at the time was the Amiga.
It was while browsing through an issue of Amiga Format that I spotted a special offer for a programming language called Blitz Basic. I hadn’t done any previous programming other than tinkering about on the Spectrum with its built-in version of BASIC, but the idea of creating games and applications seemed like a great use of my frankly worthless time.
To put it bluntly, my efforts were complete crap. The best I could manage was to copy examples out of the manual and change a couple of things. I was fairly new to computers in general, so I suppose I could’ve been forgiven for being a total spastic. My finest moment was creating a lottery generator that displayed six random numbers – it didn’t even check for duplicates. Well, it couldn’t – it just threw the numbers at the screen and didn’t store them anywhere. A friend’s dad become my first ever user. Hurrah!
My other quality productions featured a program that output some choice sentences and changed the Amiga’s display between PAL/NTSC and made the disk drive make some stupid noises. I also had a go at a game that involved the player jumping from an aeroplane and sailed down the screen, with the aim of pulling the rip-cord to land safely. If they failed, they’d splat onto the ground and an ambulance would zoom across the screen. Amazing! There was a fairly hefty period of time where I basically stopped messing around with Blitz and did my own thing. Thankfully, I came back to it after I decided I should try and get good at this programming malarkey.
1999. The Amiga gets a bit smelly.
It was 1999 when my focus shifted from the Amiga to the PC after seeing Dick‘s brand new PC. 3D games that ran in a window bigger than a squashed mushy pea? Check.
Full screen video that made me poo my pants? Check. Other items that makes this sound like a cheap sitcom? Check. Mere moments after becoming a PC owner – note that a lot of story is missing here, including the Amiga/PC hybrid that became my PC. I’m stunned the damn thing didn’t explode and kill me – I went looking for a programming language. Blitz didn’t exist for the PC, but there were rumblings about one coming, and I’m thankful. The current incarnation of Blitz for the PC uses the procedural method of programming as opposed to the event-driven method that suits application development so perfectly. I found something called Visual Basic.
It took me a while to get used to the event-driven style, and I distinctly remember cursing at it like a possessed maniac, but I persisted with it as it did actually make sense. What probably annoyed me more was that VB didn’t show any GUI or application initialisation code, which drove me mad as it was though it was trying to hide things from me. Which it was.
Programming life was good. Unlike Blitz, I jumped right into the deep end with VB and learnt all the hardcore stuff before learning the easier stuff. Because of this, I wasn’t afraid of the Windows API and bent the damn thing to my will. With Blitz, I started with the easy stuff and made my way up; even though I messed with the Amiga OS API, the more advanced stuff was a bit scary. No such thing happened with Windows. It was my fruity little bitch.
Space Year 2002. Microsoft .NET arrived.
Finally, Microsoft releases a new version of Visual Basic. Unfortunately, I hated the damn thing. It was completely different to VB6 and took forever to load the IDE and even longer to launch a compiled application. I couldn’t be doing with that crap, so I uninstalled it.
In fact, I installed it and then uninstalled it numerous times over the next few months as it successfully managed to piss me off in some spectacular way. But, finally, I went ahead and forced myself to learn it. I’m glad I did.
When Visual Studio 2003 came out, I loved it all. A much-improved language with a vastly improved editor. Or was it the other way around? Either way, I continued with it and am still using it to this very day.
The Future.
It seems I’m going to be sticking with the .NET framework as I honestly cannot see how it can be beaten. .Net 3.5 will be out in the next few months, along with a proper release of the Windows Presentation Foundation (formally Avalon) which gives some serious freedom in application design that I cannot wait to implement. It’s going to suit BlockBox absolutely perfectly.
