I’ve always been an introvert. Had only a few friends, but they were really good friends. I remember living in Corpus Christi and my parents asked me if i would mind moving to Tyler, TX. Mind you, this was my senior year in High School that I would miss. I was like yes! Lets go. My sister was the opposite. She had her friends and her school activities. My one school activity (band) I wanted OUT of, but I didn’t have the cojones to quit because of being afraid of the band director. So i saw the move as a way to get out of band and get on a tennis or golf team my real desire. (We did move to Tyler, and I got on the tennis team after failing to make the cut in golf)
In any event, my high school senior year calculus teacher was one of the greatest teachers i ever had. He taught Physics and Math. Name John Arnold. Mr Arnold loved computers and that was in 1976. So what Mr Arnold did was buy the first microcomputer kit called the Altair 8800 AND BROUGHT IT TO SCHOOL for us kids!!! It was an amazing machine that blew all of us away. You programmed it with the keyboard, but saving programs was problematic. You had to use either a paper tape reader/writer or a cassette tape. It ran machine language and BASIC. So BASIC was my first language. We did a bunch of programming both in class and after class. Mr Arnold subscribed to a magazine called Creative Computing. In this mag, was the source code for a game called Star Trek. I immediately entered the program and saved it on paper tape and cassette. So gaming was the hook even back then.
Now to the point of this post. After that experience, I begged my dad for a computer to no avail. I finally got one in college in the form of a mainframe, with stacks of punched cards as the storage medium, and a program language called FORTRAN. They didn’t have BASIC. This was a major bummer for me as FORTRAN is not as friendly as BASIC. This is when my dream happened. The “Dream” is to be in Antarctica during the winter, when I can’t do anything (its too cold to even leave the building.) But I would have a computer and could program all day for months without interruption. This was before the internet so my dream did not include an internet connection. (although it most definitely would now).
Well, this dream has been realized. I am currently retired and in China. No one speaks English here (except my wife). So I’m pretty freaking isolated. She likes to go out shopping during the day, and leaves me in the hotel room with a laptop. Dream fulfilled. I’m in heaven. Am I programming in BASIC? ah no. But I am down the Linux rabbit hole having fun.
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