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Comment by elliottcarlson | Hacker News Reader

Nice to see this announcement... Makes me remember what I was doing back in those days - and makes me wonder what other HN'ers were doing back then.

I was 12, playing on BBS' and attempting to teach myself Turbo Pascal so I could possibly write IGM's for Legend of the Red Dragon...

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Hm, SNES eh? I do believe I was cutting class to go over and play the Super Mario World demo at Target. There was a time limit on the demo where it would restart automatically, however I discovered it was controlled by external dip switches on the side of the machine. I have no idea how many people were standing behind me waiting.

One day I came back and found the dip switches epoxied in the 2 minute position.

The quickest you can complete SM is about 1:50 or so...

I was 15. I was trying to run a small bbs on my Commodore Amiga. We were learning Turbo Pascal and wondering if this new "object oriented" approach to programming was going to catch on. (I think TP5 was the first realeas to include oo extensions.)

The wall fell. I was in Germany. It was nuts.

It wasn't until a good couple of years later that I ran my own BBS - I was running Iniquity and remember the hours upon hours spent on creating ASCII art for all the screens. That and the fact that I ran the BBS on my only phone line, meaning it was a 11pm to 6am only BBS - good times.

Turbo Pascal 5.5 With Objects was the first version to support OOP, IIRC. It was the version I started on, when I was 11 in 1991.

The Internet didn't reach me until about 1995 ...

I was in Berlin, age 6, also at the fall of the wall. Father was in military intelligence for US. I think at that time I was getting games to run on our computer using MS-DOS.

I was 23 and I was starting my final year at Computer Science in Milan Italy. The last chapter of my paper work - finalized almost a year later - would report of a new software tool to browse information on the Internet called Mosaic. Since then I was using Gopher, WAIS and Veronica (was that the name?).

and Archie, too ;-)

I was eight. This was about a year after my family getting a PC running MS-DOS (maybe Windows at that point, don't remember), so I had probably just discovered QBasic. I was thus adding to the biggest lump of unrelated elements that I have ever piled into a single piece of software. All in one file, of course, and with no proper subroutines (the one book my public library had about BASIC was older than subroutines were, though I did know about GOSUB). I remember being incredibly happy upon discovering the labeled GOTO, because it was so much easier than having to number all the lines.

Meanwhile, people at CERN were building the very foundation of what my livelihood would one day be.

Likewise except also attempting to script out Trade Wars 2002. And yes, 2002 seemed futuristic too damn it.

11, and my best friend had spent the summer trying to make a video game based off "The Goonies" in QBASIC. (Graphics were done the only way we knew how, by using colored ASCII-art.)

That very month I was also 12, and at a summer camp at RIT learning 'robotics' and doing animations in Mac hypercard!

Man how times have changed.

I was working at my first programming gig, writing a hypertext display engine (WIN16 app ugh) for a prototype Boeing 777 seat-back display.

I had just graduated from HS and turned 18. At the time I had no real inkling of the idea that computers would become such a big part of my life. The bug hadn't bitten yet, so to speak. I'd dabbled with some BASIC programming as a kid, and we played around on the PCs in the library at school. Figuring out how to get out of the CD-ROM library thing and get to a DOS prompt where we could play, was a big deal back then.

But, at least for me, it was a year or two later, in college, when I got hooked on programming. Strangely enough, I don't really even remember exactly how it all started. I just remember starting to buy and read Computer Shopper magazine regularly; and then I was building a PC, getting a modem, playing around on BBS systems, getting into the hack/phreak scene, buying Herbert Schildt's book "Teach Yourself C" and downloading a C compiler from a BBS or something, deciding to major in Computer Science instead of Physics, and the rest is history.

I was working on MIT's "Lucy" question/answer system for the deans, based on Sun RPC. It generated reports using LaTeX.

I was one month away from starting college, and a month away from discovering that there were computers in the world that were permanently connected across vast distances (didn't require modems and dialing up over phone lines). That first instant telnet to a system 500 miles away = blown mind.

I was 11 programming in GW Basic. My dad didn't give me a copy of his C compiler until a year later.

Also 11. Also GW Basic. I was learning on my own and asked my mom if I could get a book on programming. She bought me some book on Basic, only issue was that it was targeted at people trying to write finance and accounting management programs (mom didn't really know one from another so not really her fault). My eyes glazeth over and it took me a few years to regain my interest/confidence in programming. I still blame that book.

I was 11. My dad was in a master's program and I used to use his account to access gopher. I had no use (or understanding) of the documents but was somehow fascinated by the endless series of menus. That, and prodigy.

Ah, we just took a hex editor to LORD and had them going through a sewer, fighting alligator (because we had to keep the length of the string constant)...

I was an...infant.

I wasn't even born yet.

16, playing with fractals in C64 assembler. Great time !!

I was 4 and probably sucking a lolly pop :)

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