My first actual computer

My first actual computer

We got it in the mid-90s — a 486 DX running MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. It screamed along at 25 MHz 33 MHz, and if that wasn’t enough for you, it had a turbo button that would boost it all the way to 100 MHz! I had to turn turbo off when I won at sol.exe, or else the card waterfall animation would play nearly instantly, but otherwise turning turbo off resulted in a hard lock and a loud angry endless beep. Thanks to an upgrade, it also had 40MB of RAM. Nice.

It came with a huge CRT monitor with an incredible high-def resolution of 1280x1024. (The full-size photo of the PreComputer above is 1024×801.) It had a keyboard lock, too, which I eventually learned how to pick using a paperclip. For reasons.

I distinctly remember its price tag of $1999 $1995. I didn’t know what many things cost yet, nor did I have any sense of how much money people with jobs actually made, so that might as well have been “infinity dollars”. Twenty years later, you can buy a phone that’s orders of magnitude better than that computer for a third of the price.

Thanks to the power of the Internet, I actually managed to track down one of the original ads! This is from page 331 of the May 30, 1995 issue of PC Mag, courtesy of Google Books, which incredibly has a searchable index of quite a few old PC Mag issues. That pins down the date we bought this to the summer of 1995, when I was 8 years old. Damn, I remember those little speakers and that joystick too.

I graduated naturally from toy-computer-BASIC to a real programming language: QBasic. I first encountered it on school computers, and mostly enjoyed it for the fascinating sample programs, nibbles.bas (Snake) and gorillas.bas (a game where two large gorillas standing on skyscrapers try to throw exploding bananas at each other). I remember scrolling through their source code numerous times, having absolutely no idea how any of it worked. I didn’t really understand the feeling at the time, but I’m sure I was amazed and confused at how the same tools I’d used to make guess-a-number could also make these graphical, uh, masterpieces.

Lurking in there is a critical stop along the way to several flavors of enlightenment: realizing and internalizing that the amazing creative things you see and admire were just made by regular people, using regular tools. You can do it too.

I only remember one notable thing I made in QBasic in those days. I must’ve still been in middle school, which would mean I was 9 or 10? I got regular homework that involved taking a set of vocabulary words and making “word pyramids” out of them, like this:

…except that the words were more like ten letters long. I guess the point was to learn their spelling, but as someone who was just fine at spelling thank you very much, I thought this was agonizingly boring and a waste of time. So I decided to write a program to do it. I spent well over a week on it, but I did it, and it worked! I managed to get pyramids (effectively squares, really) of different sizes arranged on a page automatically and to print out (directly to the printer) one line at a time. I felt like a fucking wizard for what may have been the first time.

Alas, the teacher wouldn’t accept a printout for some reason.

The 486 was the family computer for a while, what with its being our only one, but after a few years my parents bought a better one (a Pentium!) and I inherited the 486. The glorious beast. I must’ve been 11 or 12.

Somewhere along the way it also got an upgrade to Windows 95, which I hated initially. It was just a blank screen! Where was Program Manager?! Where was Cardfile?

This was just before the turn of the millenium, right when digital music was getting popular. By “digital music”, of course, I mean “Napster”, as the music industry was still a few years away from hearing that the Internet exists. You could download a massive 4 MB MP3 of your favorite song in only ten minutes!

You could, anyway. I could not. My 486 couldn’t decode MP3s in real time, even with the turbo button. In other words, it took more than one second to understand one second of music. I think I had a single WAV, but 40MB was a huge chunk of my 851MB hard drive (later improved to 1.2GB thanks to DoubleSpace, and partly mitigated by a 100MB Zip drive), so I mostly listened to MIDIs.

The timeline is a bit fuzzy, but at some point I graduated from QBasic to a few different things. I think the earliest was some proprietary shareware scripting language I’d read about in PC Magazine or whatever; it was clumsy, but it could be triggered by hotkeys and manipulate existing programs, which let me do more interesting tinkering than the confines of a command prompt would allow. I want to say it was “Wilson WindowWare” or something similarly alliterative; that finds me a extant company with a product called “WinBatch“. The name doesn’t ring a bell, but it fits the description, so maybe that was it.

I ended up with a copy of Visual Basic 6 at some point (free copy on a CD with a magazine, maybe?) and built a few little toy programs with it, like a color picker and a really bad “encryption” program. I also got into JavaScript (!) for a little while, back before anyone was even saying “DHTML”, back when XSS was unheard of and I was free to embed rainbow-text JS into a forum post. That largely fell by the wayside when I discovered server-side Perl, which was magical. veekun was probably the first big thing I tried to build (and stuck with for more than a month or two).