“Was isolated from 1999 to 2006 with a 486. Built my own late 80s OS”

At least it had real keys...

Likewise here. In my case it was a Dragon 32 in the 486 era.

taught myself qbasic using the helpfile. There were tons of examples on how to draw and how if statements worked. Progress was really slow for the first month or so. I was like a monkey trying to mimic what they saw. Didn't have internet at first so sometimes at school i would go to the library during lunch and attempt to download example programs onto a floppy disk. This was around 2000.

Ha, I had a similar situation. I grew up with a trash-80 well after it was cool in the early 1990s! Though I did get to use an Apple IIe around that time too which was awesome (did not realize how old these computers were, just was so excited to write command line BASIC).

My first computer was a Laser 286 and I marveled at the power it had. Even the turbo button from 8->12 Mhz of course :)

Oh, and the video card that took 4 AA batteries to run...

So amazing. I wonder if it's possible to manufacture that sort of limitation nowadays. Not sure if I would even want to!

My not-so-tragic story of programming in BASIC as a kid was on a Coleco Adam. I would pick up 1980's computer books/magazines from the library with BASIC code in them that I would type in. Some weren't meant for the version of BASIC the Coleco had and wouldn't run without modifications. Getting them to run was half the fun.

The Coleco Adam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleco_Adam

If I could have afforded a floppy drive for my C64, I would have been a great Loderunner player rather than a coder.

I had a similar experience, but what really drove me nuts was the selection of ridiculously good and expensive computers they always had in the PX. Who could afford one of those things on military pay?

Different generation, but I used a Pentium 2 Acer laptop, with 76Mb of RAM and a 4Gb of HDD, from 1999 through til 2005, when I'd finally cobbled together enough spare parts from other people for free to build my own AMD-based desktop.

It's what made me learn Linux, as it was so low-spec that Windows XP wouldn't run correctly on it. Slax was an excellent distribution, a Slackware-based Live CD that I forced to boot from the HDD despite it not really supporting it then. Prior to that I ran Damn Small Linux, and Windows 2000. No gaming for me, so I learned to build software instead!

I wish I could upvote this more times. My parents also didn't have a lot and I spent 3-4 years using a 286. I cut my teeth writing code and optimizing like crazy because that's all I had. Couldn't just go get more memory or a better CPU.

20 years later I guarantee you my code reflects the ingrained thinking from those early days.

Similar story, although I wouldn't call us "poor" for not being able to afford such things. My dad however managed to get his hands on an obscure failed home computer called COMX 35[1]. Not much software, BASIC, same story.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comx-35

Seems like a lot of us have a somewhat similar story. I grew up in the countryside without a tv. When I was between 10 and 13 we convinced our parents to let us buy a used c64. Since we had no tv we had to get a monitor as well which took another few month.

My career possibly started there but I was already infected by a text adventure that a grown up relative had made/adapted. (Or more specifically I was infected by the idea that you could write code and have the computer do stuff for you.)

Different generation. Couldn't afford a computer until 2008. Got a celeron clocked at 1.2 Ghz with a 128mb physical memory and 20Gb HDD running a win98. This was when everybody in the neighbourhood was playing Assasin's Creed in their core2duo.

If only my machine ran all those amazing games, I wouldn't have been a coder now ;-)

Ah, the "joy" of loading the assembler from the the cassette tape recorder from one tape, then switching the tape to load the code I work with, then changing it and then saving it on the tape before the run it since it will be lost if it crashes or just enters the loop. Then I've added the NMI hardware which allowed me to break the loop and keep the upper piece of the memory. And like some commenters also mention, that computer also didn't have the "real" keys.

But don't get me started on using the switches to input the single bits over the console on the even older computer.

People who get big projects done don't really play lots of games. Carmack, for example, has said he doesn't actually play any.

It's strange how consistently true this has been. I wonder how many games Notch plays, especially during his prime when he was making Minecraft.

It sounds quite reasonable to me. I did morally similar things on an 8088 machine, 10 years previous. Eg, no ray-tracing, but I did an animated movie. No operating system, but I wrote my own BASIC in BASIC. Everything described is well within the skills of a hobbyist.

While I played a bunch of games on it, they weren't games to play to death. Once I finished the levels of Loderunner, for example, it looped back to level 1, and I stopped playing it. The game instead was to figure out neat thing to do, then do it.

The comments on the reddit link are often uninformed, both the negative ones (few hobbyists of the era used source control) and the positive (the projects did not make real use of the hardware, and show no special 'knack' - I certainly am from that era but have no knack for the demoscene).

Also, "Osborne 486, with about 64k of RAM if memory serves me correctly. "

First, a 486 with 64K RAM is ridiculous as they typically had multiple megabytes of memory.

Second, he worked with that PC for 7 years and isn't quite confident of how much memory it had? This doesn't sound quite right either. I can clearly remember the amounts of RAM my first few PCs had, starting from 1999.

I, and I assume anyone else that has tried, get much more enjoyment out of writing a game than playing games. And writing an OS is probably even more fun than writing a game.

Edit: Also just wanted to point out that writing a few games has in a way ruined playing games for me. I still load up a new or classic game every now and then but it's more to admire what the developers have done and not so much as to play the game. I don't really 'play' games any more.

Also

> old Apple Powermacs from the 1980s (the tiny ones)

Except that Power Macs were available from 1994 until 2006.

OP here; Technically, I had already played them to death over the 1990s. Dad used to bring home multiple shareware games: Xargon, Jill of the Jungle, Wacky Wheels, Skunny Kart, you name it. I played them until I became tired of them, although I never got sick of Rise of the Triad.

I had a few floppy disks with these titles on them, but again, having played them for so long, I chose to start my own little endeavour to create games instead of playing them, so I eventually removed everything but ROTT for as much disk space as I could get (being my first computer and such, I believed it might've helped performance, was still learning at this point). When I wasn't writing crappy interactive textventures, I was writing up stories in general in EDIT. My reasoning was also that when my stepdad would come into the room, he could never say I was "off playing those bloody games" again in an argument, and that I could argue that I was studying the books I'd picked up from the library.

I did play a lot of ROTT in my spare time. It was an early copy (1.0) which had some features removed from the final game such as alternatively coloured pushpillars and the such, but as my system had no speakers, the pc speaker became more and more annoying over time as well. That much I definitely remember, but since we went through so many shareware games in the 1990s, I don't remember what was ultimately on the system when it was given to me (nor when it was thrown away). I would give everything I owned to get it back, but unless someone chose to salvage and restore it, that system is long gone and crushed up.

>If I were essentially locked up in that scenario, I would at least be confident of the names of the 3 games which were installed, since they'd inevitably be played to death, regardless of how good they were. Also there's this

You'd be surprised what happens after 10 years or so. There are games I played as a kid countless times, in arcardes and on my PC, and yet I coulnd't remember their titles at all when I was at university age and such.

I only rediscovered some of their titles with luck and queries on Google later (in my 30's).

E.g.:

"game where a frog tries to cross the road" was apparently Frogger.

"game where you have a crosshair and hit people" is Prohibition.

"pc game where a cat jumps in an neighborhood" is Alley Cat, etc.

I'll remember visual images from tons of places, people, games, music, street names and books. But I'd not have a clue what they were called.

I'd know where my school was, I'd just 'go there', I didn't know the street name.

I'd turn on the TV, I didn't know what brand it was.

I'd just turn on the computer and play Escape Velocity, didn't know it was called that.

There are lots of exceptions, like I wouldn't miss the name 'teenage mutant ninja turtles' or ever forget it. But especially for things like computer games when I was 8, I'd just 'doubleclick the game icon with the picture of a car' not having a clue what that racing game was called.

I think that's a great question and I could list some contributing factors but I think a thorough answer could upset a lot of people. I lost 100+ karma just for some criticism of Apple ;-) Yeah, let's critique all the modern languages, tools and libraries--that will go over real well here.

Who says it isn't? Maybe C++ just wasn't a good choice for someone coming from BASIC.

I would definitely put that down to experience, C++ is a much different beast to QBasic. Qbasic being geared towards beginners, C++ being geared towards professionals.

I mean it's the difference between a tool box 70 years ago (Software lives by dog years) and a tool box today, the tools you will find are vastly different, and even though you can build a house with the tools from 70 years ago, that does not necessarily mean you will be able to travel forward in time and build a house with todays tools because you have zero experience with it.

The truth. Take web development. If you're willing to look objectively at the state of HTML5 and the lack of feature support for browsers (that stick around), then yes we've established many good specs and communities, however for the enduser comparing it to Flash back in the days, nothing different. At least Flash development was easy.

goes back to building JS and CSS files with his frontend build system, and testing in IE8

It was incredibly frustrating for me as a young child, during the DOS days you had a fairly complete, if somewhat primitive, simple development environment with complete documentation available. I could easily do silly things like composing "melodies" or draw arbitrary shapes on the screen. Of course in retrospect any other programming language other than QBasic would have been more educational, if it had similar good documentation and integrated support for running programs. But it was still better than with windows, where there really wasn't anything comparable available that I knew of and visual studio (which I got as a christmas present, when I was 10 years old :)) seemed rather incomprehensible in comparison.

I don't think C++ is anywhere near the state of the art in terms of usability. I wonder what he would do with something like Python + PyGame.

I guess it was for two reasons. Looong post ahead but it describes in a fair amount of detail why I eventually was turned off of C programming, and it was not necessarily the language itself.

1) I opted to try and self-teach using tutorials which were highly inconsistent with one-anothers practices instead of learning at an accredited college or doing some type of course. It's also possible the tutorials I used were not that brilliant. I did find some fantastic ones later on around the time I stopped (as I started working full time).

2) I believe my folly also lies in jumping the gun, a lot. With BASIC I was able to just skip around in the commands list and experiment with each command in an afternoon, figure out how it worked and see if it was what I needed. If so, I had learnt what I needed, if not, I had learnt something for use in another day, and another code. It mightn't be the most optimal way to learn, but for me it allowed me to create -exactly- what I had intended, even if the mechanics inside were smoking and banging around, they still did what they needed to.

C was just not quite the same, and I wouldn't expect it to be. It's a much more powerful language from what I've observed.

One of the issues I frequently stumbled into, would be a tutorial that would state to use an external library/header that was never explained nor included on the tutorial page. One might state that I needed to include SDL.H but at no point in the tutorial, did it describe what the contents of it were, or of its purpose / where to get it. Now sure enough, you can google it and find that it refers to the Simple DirectMedia Library but am I wrong to think it's not professional to write in references and sources in a tutorial intended for beginners? "Figure it out / google it" doesn't always strike me as the best way to teach someone, but instead writing down a clear explanation of what is required and where it can be obtained etc.

I also had stumbled upon tutorials where the author had written their own custom headers for use with the code, but the headers themselves were not included for download or reference in that tutorial, nor the contents of them explained, so I'd often have no idea of what to substitute in place of that header or how to recreate that header accordingly.

I also became frequently discouraged by the responses I got when asking for help. It seemed that if I (as well as a LOT of other people, I saw this happen to a tonne of others) was stuck or unsure and made threads anywhere asking for a bit of advice or critique as to where I've gone wrong, I was constantly met with replies of either "If you don't even know the answer then you shouldn't be programming." or "The answer is obvious, programming is not for you." etc. I made a post at one point asking for a bit of advice on building a simple calculator once as one of my first few applications, and was met with responses of "This is a HUGE waste of time, there's already calculator sources out there available for download." which sort of missed the point; I was trying to make one, rather than plagurize someone elses. Getting questioned as to why you're learning to code when you can just steal someone elses seems the wrong way to go.

Perhaps I was in the wrong communities for me, although interestingly enough there was a tech journal article that I had read not too long ago where a senior programmer slammed the sadly all-too-frequent types of these responses due to the fact that it discourages a lot of potentially good novice programmers, with people arguing for and against negative reinforcement. Personally, being told "your code is shit, you're definitely not made to be a coder" isn't really inspiration to me. Being told "You've made an error here, this is what's wrong, this is why it's not working and this is how you fix it. Have another go at it." seems more appropriate. Sure a few people react to being told they're not good enough by thinking "Well fine, I'm going to beat you at that statement and do the BEST DAMN APPLICATION EVER", but to me, I don't like to think of programming as a boot camp, but as learning just as you would if it were photoshop or 3dsmax, and I sure as hell didn't hear people in any 3dsmax class I've attended saying "You're really bad at modeling, you should quit before you waste too much time on this.".

you were spoilt by the Amiga's pre-emptive multitasking. It's funny I recall "pre-emptive multitasking" being a big selling point of the Amiga's OS, but I never understood it at the time, I just knew it was better.

My first programming platform was basic on the Casio FX-702P, I remember reading the manual and realising what programming was all about... oh the sense of wonder and possibility on a 9 year-old. The peak of my achievement was a version of E.T. for it (my cousin had an Atari 2600 and to my little brain that was a pretty cool game). I saved my programs by writing them down on a notebook, as my dad never got any peripherals for it...

I've finally stumbled upon your post, after reading through all the comments this has gotten.

They definitely don't build 'em like they used to! The Pentium 1 133mhz system I used for a while after leaving is still in top notch shape today. I opened it up last year and there's no dust, rust or corrosion at all (and this is after it sat in a heavily tropical atmosphere for a few years recently). The hard disk is in perfect shape too, the whole thing runs like new.

I wonder how well the Osborne 486 would be running if I still had it, or if someone ever salvaged it out there and is running it today. Kind of a crazy thought but it's a shame to think that it's very likely become part of a landfill.

Was it a PC-compatible? If so he might have had more memory but been unable to address it because he was running in Real Mode.

from another comment...

"The confusion likely stems from the various limits which existed when running qbasic in real mode on a 486. Conventional memory was limited to 640kb. Access to higher amounts of memory either required switching to protected mode or using XMS. Additionally, there was the segmentation limit of 64k for pointers, which may have limited things in qbasic."

By contrast, I'm delighted every time I come across another "me too, time for my story" comment in this thread, because those are the interesting ones.

I'm saddened that you're saddened by nerds relating to each other, talking about things they actually liked and feeling nostalgia.

Everyone, let's be sure we stick to the real business of HN: gossip about companies which were started for no reason other than to get sold, fighting over the brands of fetishized personal electronics, hagiographies of people like Steve Jobs and Edward Snowden, flamewars about women in tech, and preening about how we personally are the top 1% of software engineers and only hire people like ourselves.

Otherwise, someone might feel saddened.

I'm amused that a comment stating this point would (seemingly unironically) begin with the word "I'm".

For what it's worth I don't disagree that there is some cosmic absurdity and truth in what you are pointing out, but it's just such an innate component of human communication (in all of its forms, since long before there was an Internet and long before this post existed) that complaining about it is akin to saying "I'm saddened by the way these people are always breathing".

...and yes, I began this post with my own "I'm" to show I'm a proper software coder who appreciates the humor in meta-level recursion and thus I'm ever so clever!

Very happy to have found your comment. Some of them even start with "While not as interesting as OP's, [here's my boring suburban story]"

Guess this is the generation Me.

"The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting." - Fran Lebowitz

All of those "me too" stories are really about saying one thing: You Are Not Alone.

Ditto, I've noticed this as an extremely common style of communication on this site, and I often have difficulty reading through the comment threads for this exact reason.

Agreed, basically the most incorrect thing I've ever read on the Internet. Windows 2000 was amazing.

That quote definitely doesn't make sense. Maybe he's thinking of Windows ME, widely regarded as being worse than 98? It's an odd thing to mix up for anyone familiar with the two.

Maybe it was because it was easier for the college to lock down the Windows 2000 workstations as opposed to the Windows 98 computers with Novell NetWare. I don't know, though, and I can't speak for the author. The story has more holes than swiss cheese. I honestly don't believe any of the account, but it is useful for bringing up nostalgia.

It shouldn't hurt your head. Windows 2000 marked a switch from the 95/98 line to the NT line and that created some compatibility problems in early days. The rest of this is subjective.

Suggesting Windows 2000 gave him "no idea what modern operating systems were like" was pretty jarring too.... far from being "obsolete" it was only four years old at the time and from the perspective of the average user not stuck on a 486 lacked only a bit of UI gloss compared with the state-of-the-art XP. If nothing else, you'd expect he might be impressed at the progress the internet had made since 1999

Indeed after hearing about Windows 2000, I'm under the belief that it wasn't the OS at fault, but rather the horridly outdated and poorly maintained systems that the school was running it on. They never saw a defrag in their life, and took at least 10-15 minutes to book up, and even at that, doing anything was painfully slow. Should you accidentally hit the start button or run something, you were in for another painfully long wait.

I apologise to the Win 2000 fans. I never actually have tried it on a system in much greater health, but from what I've heard in the last few days, I'm sure it's not that bad, and guess I was just a bit mis-lead by the ridiculous systems they ran on.

I'm actually very willing to bet the school is still running those systems today.

I'm certainly reading! And with great interest at that, it's very interesting hearing of the other Australians who were in similar situations. I find it interesting too how a lot of those from America and other countries are quick to criticize the story and are shocked at how "you didn't have a mobile phone at age 13!?" or "I don't believe for a second that he didn't have an ADSL connection in rural Australia in 2002", or even the assumption that all our public schools in the outback of Australia were equipped with the latest in Pentium technology when in fact, some were as far back as 15 years out of date.

Thanks for the invite too. I don't know where I'd start with modern tech. I've been building up more knowledge over the years and started by purchasing each individual part to build my own system in 2009. I'm no whiz but I'd say I have a reasonable degree of literacy nowadays. The one thing I could use help with is getting started in modern programming. My head appears to still be stuck in the idea of using a simple text-editor-style compiler with no additional libraries, headers, (linkers?) etc required. I had a bit of trouble finding good tutorials that actually supplied the relevant libraries, headers etc for the code they were explaining, so it became difficult when they would expect that every new programmer knows straight away what the SDL header is for example, and where it can be acquired from.

Yep, it's more or less a shell. I probably should've clarified it a bit better in the imgur description. It's basically a dos shell representitive of my rendition of a "late 1980s OS".

I also first learned to program in TI-BASIC, on a TI-83+ in 6th grade, and I did it prolifically for the next four years. Learning programming at that age was a huge advantage when I "officially" learned later: even though TI-BASIC only has 26 variables and no subroutines, flow control is basically the same, and it gave me an intuitive understanding to how programming languages work.

Also, TI-BASIC made it so easy to display graphics, just by using the 'output' function or plotting to the graph. I think a huge turn off to beginner programmers is the amount of material you have to learn before you can do simple stuff like that (I remember looking for a "draw pixel" function in Java, only to learn to my dismay that I had to choose a GUI toolkit and create a window first). The ease of using the TI API made it addictive, and it lured me into programming for hours at a time in school.

Ah the memories of the TI range of calculators.

We had the TI-85 in our year. I wrote a chat program which used the link cable. With an "enhanced and extended" link cable, it was possible to chat with a classmate sitting several meters away. Teachers knew nothing, as it was a calculator and just a calculator for them.

1998 - chat on a handheld device without data or SMS costs :)

A kid in my year at school did the same in 2002/2003. He programmed multiplayer snake, pong and a little top-down tank game that was pretty basic. He'd write these up in various classes and we'd play them multiplayer over the link cables.

He was a really talented programmer but eventually became really weird and drove everybody away, so I have no idea what he's doing now.

> 4-level grayscale sprite editor (which worked by flickering the pixels of the 1-bit display which had a slow enough response time to create a static gray color if alternated quickly enough)

I have heard of games (like Doom) on the TI calculators, that also had sound effects. The program was sending pulses to the linkport, and the user needed a 3.5 mm to 2.5 mm adapter to connect a headphone plug into it, but then you got sound.

Aw, when I was an exchange student in Japan, all I had was my Casio graphing calculator (ironically bought in Norway, as it was one of a few required/approved for use on exams). The limited programming language was rather awful, but I still managed to implement plotting a zirpensky gasket, and a mandelbrot set (in black and white. The mandelbrot took roughly three hours to render, as I recall. I'd just start it, and leave it in my bag, and check it after a few periods... it was a little bit like self-mutilation -- but also a great feeling when you manage to make something like you intended, despite the limitations of the system... I had bought a copy of "The Mathematical Tourist: Snapshots of Modern Mathematics" by Peterson. A great and fun update on math, with pretty pictures. And enough detail that I could implement eg. the mandelbrot generator :-)

I'm not too sad to see old calculators go -- I'm just hoping we'll get something like python notebooks on smart phones used in the classroom. Might have some problems with the networking... maybe there's a marked for an android pad that doesn't have any wireless hw?

In Norway those Casio calculators were also approved for use at the college level -- but they were stupidly banned, because you could flash the rom, and store all sorts of useful things on them. Really stupid IMNHO, because if you can solve the (college level/sen. high school level) exam with the help of some utility or other -- or just a large book -- the exam is probably structured very poorly.

There was an initiative to move to "open book exams" -- where you were allowed to basically bring any books/notes you wanted. I think it was great -- the questions were a little harder -- and you still had to know the subject matter or you'd run out of time before completing -- but I think it encouraged better tests than when you could essentially administer a glorified spelling test for any subject.

> I realized that my work was technically obsolete as hell, and not really of any value.

For all of the benefits of the internet, I see this as a tragic side effect. Rather than just trying something and seeing if it works, the first instinct is to Google it to see if anyone else has done something similar. Even if you manage to start on something, eventually you'll be exposed to someone who's done it so much better and more thoroughly than you and get discouraged and give up.

Of course, plenty of innovation still happens and people can find inspiration in superior implementations, but the loss feels similar to the loss of biodiversity, or language diversity resulting from globalization -- that is, isolated populations create vastly different solutions to the same set of problems in ways that aren't possible without those barriers.

As the original Author of Axe, that's an extremely inspiring story.

I also, as you can guess, first got into programming on my trusty TI-83+ when I started high school. Without really knowing the TI-BASIC language and lacking the link cable, I remember some time when I was in the library typing a Mandelbrot set program line for line from the computer, trying to figure out where all those random tokens were located. Once I finally got that working, I was hooked and started making all sort of different programs.

Some of the early programs I remember creating were mostly math programs and algorithms I learned from classes. But very soon I started getting into gaming. I had always wanted to make really cool games, but I always ended up limited by the capabilities of the calculator, and ended up mostly producing puzzle games; Minesweeper, Sudoku, Skyscrapers, etc. I also managed to make a text adventure and an 'AI' chat bot.

I wondered how people were able to make some of the more advanced games and eventually stumbled upon assembly. It took me a really long time to grasp all the concepts and it was very frustrating. Every instruction has a bunch of side effects, you have to remember what every register is holding at every point in time, and you have to memorize all the mnemonics. I was also annoyed that I couldn't program it on the go (Mimas didn't exist at the time) but that certainly didn't stop me! With nothing better to do during that bus ride to and from school, I actually printed out all the op-codes, ram locations, bcalls, ascii tables, token tables, and would literally type in the hexadecimal into the calculator to program! It was insane and really dangerous, constantly deleting the memory every time I typed a wrong character or forgot about the endianess. I eventually just gave up on that and stuck with programming assembly games on the computer in my free time.

By the time I learned enough assembly to produce my first full game, a PacMan clone, it was around the end of high school and it was then that I decided that I really wanted to make it easier for people like myself to be able to make actually good games on the go. It wasn't until a year later that I started creating Axe Parser for that purpose. Although I didn't have any formal experience with compilers, languages, or other relevant theory I started anyway, just doing what I figured would work best. It actually managed to succeed and after only a month of work, I was able to program a full game in about an hour! It was exactly what I wished had existed when I was in school, and it's super exciting to see there are students out there now that actually have this power and are making awesome stuff! Its even more thrilling when it influences people to get into coding more seriously. Warms my heart every time I see things like this :)

As for me now, I haven't touched z80 programming for a few years now. I'm working at an amazing start-up where I get to combine programming and mathematics to do some really interesting things.

15MHz is not from the 70s ;-) (at least outside of labs). The IBM PC shipped with a 4.77MHz CPU in the early 80s, the 386 came out in 1986 at 12 MHz, the Mac II was 16MHz in 1987.

I got hooked on programming by the HP65, an early and very expensive programmable calculator (with magnetic data storage!) that a family friend let me play with for an afternoon. Eventually I got my own Sinclair calculator (36 instruction memory!) and programmed it obsessively. If that thing ran at 1MHz I'd be very, very surprised.

Incidentally, around 1983-85 there was a brief explosion of electronic typewriters with small (usually 2-4-line) LCD displays and oversized calculators with qwerty keyboards, a decent amount of memory (16 kB say), and some form of BASIC. They looked interesting, but I don't think I know anyone who bought one (and my friends and I were all programming geeks).

This is how I got into programming as well, creating programs for my TI-84 that helped me cheat on math tests. The watershed point for me was figuring out how to archive programs so that a "2nd+7+1+2" reset wouldn't delete what I'd created.

Frustrated the teachers to no end as well, I'd never do my homework but get A's on all of my tests/quizzes. I guess I was too busy learning the material to cheat, instead of doing the homework...

I eventually got caught when I started giving the programs to popular kids so they would include me in stuff, luckily I had written a failsafe that deleted the cheats, but left some games I had (even at 14 I knew how confusing false positives can be). I got in trouble for playing games, the popular kids got in trouble for cheating. I wasn't included in much for a while after that...

Lots of nostalgia here. I had an HP 48G and it had it's own legitimate programming language of which I barely scratched the surface. I programmed and downloaded all sorts of games on there. Wrote basic quadratic equation solvers and graphers.

One of my favorite things about it was that it had an internal speaker. You could specify the frequency and duration of notes. I was in concert band at the time and was into "The Planets" suite by Holst. I ended up writing two programs that played the main tracks for Jupiter. I had another friend who had the calculator so I gave him one part and retained one for myself. We started both programs at the same time and listened to beautiful tinny classical music.

It was stupid easy to output sound on that thing. Like someone else mentioned it was also very easy to output to the screen. I know applications are much more complicated than they were back then but I do feel bad for kids that they might not have a sandbox environment to try to push the boundaries for their knowledge. This kind of stuff got me hooked on coding.

Consider that in the late 90's cellphone penetration was still low enough that not being allowed cellphones was fairly common, and certainly not something anyone would react to.

Not being allowed to leave the house after school hours, or use the internet is still a fairly common situation for kids in many sects that are not considered problematic enough to interfere with.

What you describe as "being kept captive", others would consider protecting their children from corrupting outside influences (I'd like to emphasise that I absolutely don't think that is right).

That the stepfather in this case seems to have been motivated by hiding from the authorities doesn't make much difference - the point is most schools have students that are in similar situations, so it's not something most schools would see as exceptional and something they can interfere with.

It's a difficult tradeoff in terms of child protection, because the traumatic experiences of being taken into care or disrupted by lots of interference can easily become worse than what the interference is meant to fix, and because the moment you start passing moral judgement over peoples parenting, you're in for a crazy struggle over how it is acceptable for people to raise their kids.

The teachers noticed, and they tried to help at first, but this only resulted in aggressive confrontations with my stepfather. They then wanted absolutely nothing to do with either himself or me.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/child-death-cover-...

The Department of Community Services was responsible for overseeing cases such as child abuse etc in during that time (or DOCS as we called it). My counsellor spoke in great depth to me about it, but he was not confident that much would be done (as seen above, many many cases are left behind or ignored). He put in a lot of requests to DOCS to look into my situation, and they did only a few of those times, but their methods were shocking and they did absolutely nothing. They interviewed my stepfather once and it more or less consisted of "have you mistreated a minor in your household?" "No?" "Oh okay well thanks anyway, bye". On another occasion, they spoke to me about it. I honestly couldn't remember what we talked about, as I felt a bit too young to fully understand what was really going on. I spoke to so many people about it and no-one was able to help, including the police.

(I'm wondering if the department was understaffed or suffering some other internal crisis? They still are apparently.)

In 1999, I would've been 10 years old, so when I finally left, I was 17 nearing 18 as the new year approached. Goodbye teen years, but it would've been a lot worse if I was a kid. A lot of the physical nasties that occurred stopped as I grew older, perhaps out of the fact that my stepfather was aware I'd be a lot wiser about how to tackle it (ie I could more easily convince police of something going on.). He was very careful to get as close to the border-line of crossing the arrest threshold as he could, without ever actually going over it. He never hit my mother, but he hit us and we were raised by him to believe that getting either choked, kicked in the back etc was "Discipline" rather than abuse.

I'd have to agree on the inadequacy of both child protection and law enforcement here, as it's been shown in the last couple of days with the "terrorist" in sydney, the justice system here is seriously broken. The same man who deprived us of liberty was walking free on around 40-50 other charges, including break and enter, sexual assault of a minor, assault etc, much like the fellow who held up the cafeteria. I don't know where the break down is, but the justice system always seems to "let people off with a warning" or a light sentence. If you assault someone, expect to walk free. If you break into someones house and molest a child as he did, you walk free with a big scary "warning". If you continue, it's another big scary "warning" etc.

He's still out today, and I haven't pursued it, because I know that there is no way he would ever be behind bars, the justice system completely let us down and I wouldn't trust it with my life. One of the first men I rented my first apartment with was exactly the same; multiple charges that should have landed him behind bars, yet he was walking free but with police coming to the door from time to time to "check on him". Of course it wouldn't stop any crook from doing something stupid if they are clever enough not to be caught.

Now that would've been more interesting. I never got to experiment with printing or connecting anything to my own system, but it would've been fun to make something like what you've described.

Indeed C was a bit intimidating to me at first. I took up a TAFE games programming course in 2008 to learn it, but our teacher was an ex-banker and didn't seem to really have any enthusiasm for games, and there wasn't really any "games programming" in the course. I left after getting mugged in broad daylight on a busy road (Mount Druitt is absolutely atrocious, never going back there again!)

I wrote it up as best as I could in the imgur description, but I'll see if I can summarize it here.

Basically, I was without any modern resources for quite some time. I had a 486, QBASIC and EDIT.com to play with; the rest of the DOS exes etc I didn't want to touch out of fear of buggering up my system as I wasn't very computer literate.

My library had two 1970s books on BASIC which I loaned out (Basic BASIC and Advanced BASIC by James S Coan) and with nothing else to do in the hours after school, I decided to try my hand at it. I played around with it for a bit and built a really primitive "DOS Clone", which relied on a simple series of INPUT's, PRINT's, IF / THEN statements and GOTO. I then also began experimenting with the ASCII Character map which was included in the QBASIC help file, and realized that if I used the correct ASCII codes, I was able to form visualizations on the screen, simple GUIs etc. I combined the two and began adding more and more functionality to it until I eventually named it "OSCI" ("Aussie"). That's pretty much all there was to it.

How: An old 486, QBASIC, and lots of free time

Why: Boredom, curiosity.

I had access to two programming books; Basic BASIC and Advanced BASIC by James S Coan which I loaned out (and frequently over-loaned) from my high school library. I searched intensely during lunch periods at the library for other books on anything related to computers and programming, but I don't recall any other notable computer books.

The books I had loaned out however were dated 1977 - 1978 according to a recent google search. Very obsolete for the time. I'm tempted to call the high school library and see if I can buy them, since they'd be even more so useless for any student who wants to get into programming now.

Better yet, it's just given me an idea, if they still haven't updated their books on programming, I might even see if I can buy a few good modern books on C / Python etc and donate them to the library, along with software. Who knows, it might stop someone else from ending up the same way I did.

I haven't seen the movie, but I have read once that he used to sleep to orange lights as he believed humans would sleep better to it after being accustomed to sleeping by the light of a fire for many many years.

I'll have to look into his early years and see, although I was probably nowhere near. I was a very emotionally unstable and unusual kid after the move to the country. I had zero social skills and a lot of post traumatic stress disorder from events at home. My methods to socializing and living in general were very odd.

I hoarded food and possessions as the cupboards at home were often (but not always) padlocked to keep me from picking my own food out. I would hunt around in bins for discarded food or 5 cent coins to save for canteen food and was referred to as a "scab" quite a bit, but I tended to ignore this, even though I was probably seen as one of "Those oddball kids". I had very little value placed on my reputation.

A lot of my possessions were often confiscated, and anything of special value (ie gifts from my dad) were often smashed and broken in front of me. I had a beautiful Carramar Lava Lamp once that he purchased for me which was destroyed by my stepfather to stop me from staying up at night and using it to read. The trait still sticks with me now; I don't hoard general junk, but I am extremely protective of my current possessions.

Not sure if this ties in with Julian Assanges story. Again I'll have to check it out. He sounds like a very intriguing person.

Reminds me of the story recently about the guy who built a game over what, ten years or so? (Can't find a link right now.)

Note: I am not the person in the imgur. The title was changed after I submitted to one that is, IMHO, much more confusing.

(original title was "An Australian, isolated from 1999-2006 with a 486. Built his own late 80s OS").

My experience level with computers was minimal; I had basic knowledge of running games from the DOS prompt or a particular type of DOS Shell that my dad had set up on our home computer.

Other than that, I had no knowledge. I didn't know anything about processor power, RAM, etc.

I'm not sure if it's used for anything anymore, but QBASIC is, I believe, freely available on Microsofts legacy FTP. It's a very safe and easy to use environment to learn about putting together some basic programs (hence the name BASIC?). If you learned to say, build a calculator in QBASIC, it wouldn't be hard to take that programming knowledge and move it across to a modern language like C.

I guess I've answered the threads question in a sense.

Though I wish I'd at least had a basic copy of Windows XP, and a good C++ compiler + some reference books.

That's a very good question. I can't actually remember any particular inspiration for using 1995 as a start date, but it was probably just a random year to give it an "Authentic" look as if it had been some old shell system for the TAFE that had been in use for ages (ie much like how most software will have "copyright 1996-2014" to certify the date on which the copyright was filed and what the current year was. It was however, never meant to be an authentic piece of software or have any significant numbers, merely written as a brief demonstration that used a few simple commands to list file and directory structures. 2006 was the year that code would've been made though.

Why wouldn't it be true?

The terms used in the article are misleading though, like many people have already pointed out. Not an OS, a shell, I don't even know if you can build an OS with QBASIC alone, maybe with some assembler support, but I don't recall qbasic supporting assembler, at least without any binary tricks ?

Today I still have a working Pentium 1 with hard disks in full operating order.

As for the 486, I brought it down to my dads when I moved, and switched to using his much more modern system. It did eventually "die" in 2007-2008. My dad threw it out after the clock chip failed on the motherboard. I was pretty bummed because it sounds like a fairly straightforward fix / such a minor issue, but he's as sentimental as I and referred to it as "an old clunker".

I've seen a 486 machine with a QBasic program to read values from a parallel port, working perfectly on an university (on a Physics lab) in 2000 .

He has been lucky that his 486 don't broke, but sometimes the old hardware is more resilient what you think. The only hard drives that I seen to die, was modern hard drives of >100GiB . However, I have here an Amiga 1200 with a little hard disk of 200MiB that it keeps working fine.

I had a mac classic II (1991 vintage) that eventually stopped working in 2004-2005 or so (IIRC). Sometimes old computers live longer than average. I also had a PC XT clone from 1987 before that that I am pretty sure lived more than 10 years.

It's very hard to say.

Right before leaving for the country, circa 1997-1998, my best friend was trying to get me into C++, as he was a games dev / games fanatic like I was. I had always wanted to get my hands into C++ and start working with it. It never really transpired sadly as I had no idea where to start.

I really wish that I had Linux around that time. It's always piqued my curiosity but I fear I wouldn't be able to think of a practical purpose for it (however that probably also stems from a lack of knowledge about Linux itself and what it can do). I have as much knowledge of Linux and its capabilities as a 3 year old would in driving a car.

Indeed, I've re-worked the title to include quotes around the "OS" parts as everyone who states that it is a shell is actually correct. I should've termed it better.

Indeed having no inspiration or having a lot of boredom leaves the mind to create its own entertainment and innovation, however I'd disagree that I'm smart. My code is merely a series of hackery and visual tricks. It technically -does- do what it is supposed to, but it is nowhere near as maintainable, optimized and well written as the code of that of a talented or seasoned programmer.

Thanks for your kind words!

I'd love to write a larger and more in depth recount of it, and release it alongside the codes someday. I would more than likely release it for free, or if it ever got published, donate a lot of the proceeds to a domestic violence charity.

Sadly not as far as I know.

As proven with the recent attack in Sydney (the guy had been walking free with 40 charges against him), my stepfather was in the precise same position. Multiple charges but walking free because the justice system had catastrophically failed.

Exactly what happened to me in 2006 when I left the country. I wanted to catch up on everything; I had Deus Ex, the Quake series, DOOM etc to get through.

Now if I try and code something, there are too many distractions, yet when you're sitting in a silent basement, your ideas tend to fill your head pretty quick (+ many a hot dull afternoon at school).