My first actual computer

My first built computer

I was still using a 486 in 2000 or 2001, at which point it was comically obsolete. Again, the timeline is fuzzy here, because I could swear that I got a new machine by 2001, but I distinctly remember building it in a place I thought I only lived in 2003. I don’t think I had an extra machine in the middle there, either.

I couldn’t tell you much about the process of building it, but I imagine it went much the same as my experience with building computers now: get a bunch of parts, wiggle them together because everything only fits one way, spend all day trying to figure out why it doesn’t boot only to find that a stick of RAM is sticking out one millimeter too far.

It was a Pentium something in a tower case, which was quite a change. I named it kabigon, the Japanese name for Snorlax, beginning a theme that I’ve continued ever since.

I also put Gentoo on it for reasons I cannot fathom. This was back in the day when the “real” way to install Gentoo was from stage1, which means you don’t get an installer; you just get a massive, massive list of instructions on how to manually bootstrap everything from scratch. It took days to get a working system, including a day or two to compile X and KDE, but I sure did learn a lot about Linux and how a desktop environment is put together.

I’m not sure XP was actually out at this point, so consumer Windows still had no built-in way to share an Internet connection, and ISPs weren’t yet giving out routers. The very concept of a router was still pretty alien. Up until this point, we’d been sharing the connection via some terrible shareware garbage called WinGate (which is somehow still around) that mostly worked, except when it didn’t. I, despite having no clue what the hell I was doing, offered to instead have my computer act as the router, because Linux is better at being a router than Windows ME. Which is true! The plan almost fell apart when my parents got tired of waiting for days for me to finish creating a computer, but in the end I did manage to get kabigon acting as the router, by blindly pasting a bunch of iptables rules my boyfriend gave to me. Hm, actually, I think my interest in Linux can all be traced back to (and squarely blamed on) him.

In 2003 I was also in a high school programming class. The class really had two classes taught at the same time: computer science 1, where the teacher taught maybe 16 or 20 kids to do simple stuff in QBasic; and computer science 2, where four of us who vaguely knew what we were doing basically had free reign. I’d taken the AP Computer Science AB class and exam a year or two prior (and was nearly constantly mystified by why C++ was such a pain in the ass compared to everything else I knew), so by now I was finally dipping my toes into building slightly more complex stuff.

One such thing I remember well is an implementation of Hex, the board game on a hexagonal grid where two players try to be the first to connect their two opposite sides of the board. I remember it so well, in fact, that I have managed to exactly reproduce the source code and placed it in this gist just for you. Also I madethis screenshot.

Or maybe I just still have most of the code I wrote in that class because I’m a packrat. I’m glad, too, because it’s the oldest window I have into what the heck I was doing thirteen years ago. I see I was also showing off. At one point the computer science 1 class had been told to write a change-giving program, where you enter a cost and an amount paid, and the program spits out the assortment of coins and bills you should get back. It’s not too difficult a problem; read a line of input, do a little math, print out a few numbers. I, however, decided that not only would I also write this program, but I would be a total dick about it.

Don’t worry, I’ve got the source code for that, too! And it is unreadable slop.

I also remember an assignment about drawing a picture using QBasic’s drawing primitives. So I dug up a picture an artist friend had drawn me, reduced it to 16 colors, and wrote a Perl script to generate a QBasic program that would render it one pixel at a time. Alas, I don’t have the source code for that.

But my greatest achievement was probably writing a Chip’s Challenge clone, complete with a bunch of tiles that were supposed to be in the eternally-delayed Chip’s Challenge 2 (incidentally, now released at last). I had no understanding of a game clock or an event queue or any of that nonsense, so it’s entirely turn-based; the game waits for you to move, and then the entire world updates. I never got around to making any monsters, so it would’ve been purely puzzle-based, except I never got around to making any levels, either. I don’t think you could even die; the game would just not let you walk onto hazards. Also it was just DOS characters, no graphics. I was working on a level editor, but never finished it. Tragic.

That’s all of interest I can remember. A couple years later, I was in college, playing a lot of World of Warcraft and making bad stubs of websites that never saw the light of day.