Beginnings, or load ""

First there was BASIC. The only command I knew was load "", the cursor disappeared and you could load a game. You typed it, pressed play on the tape recorder, the border flashed in stripes, a few minutes of screeching and there was the game. I had no idea what was going on in there, to me it was a spell that turned the screech from a tape into a game.

One day my brother showed me border 0. The border went black, so something changed, just like with load, and I was sure it had to load something too. Except the cursor kept blinking and nothing happened. I asked what I could load with it now, and it turned out nothing, the border is just black :-)

I think that was the first time it dawned on me that these weren't spells, every command does one specific thing, and I wanted to know how it all worked inside instead of just loading games someone else had written.

Then came some tinkering in ZX assembler. If the computer reads a screech from tape and turns it into a game, I thought, it can read music too. I wrote something that read sound from the input straight into memory, all 48 kb of it, hoping to record music that way, and when I played it back it was just a screech. Today I roughly know why: the ZX Spectrum input sees a single bit, signal or no signal, so there wasn't much music left. It didn't work.

Next was Visual Basic, windows, buttons and the first programs that looked like real ones.

My dad told me back then not to mix passion with work, because it would kill the passion. He said it in good faith and from his own experience, and it's probably true for some people, but it didn't work out that way for me. I'm glad that after a few years of wandering through industries that didn't satisfy me, I'm finally programming.