Random Positivity Thread: Happy Computer Memories
Random Positivity Thread: Happy Computer Memories
Time for some warm-and-fuzzies! What happy memories do you have from your early days of getting into computers/programming, whenever those early days happened to be?
When I was in middle school, I read an article in Discover Magazine about "artificial life" — computer simulations of biological systems. This sent me off on the path of trying to make a simulation of bugs that ran around and ate each other. My tool of choice was PowerBASIC, which was like QBasic except that it could compile to .EXE files. I decided there would be animals that could move, and plants that could also move. To implement a rule like "when the animal is near the plant, it will chase the plant," I needed to compute distances between points given their x- and y-coordinates. I knew the Pythagorean theorem, and I realized that the line between the plant and the animal is the hypotenuse of a right triangle. Tada: I had invented the distance formula!
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I don't have many good memories but I recall having a 486 or Pentium 1 in 2001 when it was already old, in my college dorm room, running NetBSD to serve my and my roommate's personal blog.
One problem we had is that periodically the ADSL modem would stop responding and nothing could fix it but a hard reset. If nobody was using the Internet (which used to be a thing back then!! not looking at the Internet 24/7!!) it could go hours without us noticing that the blog was down. I couldn't program or access the modem in anyway, it was a black box, so my workaround was as follows. NetBSD had a /dev/speaker device which could play notes on the buzzer like "echo 'ABC#' > /dev/speaker". I made a little script that output small, random 7-note melodies to /dev/speaker (in pentatonic so that they sound "musical", and in the lower octaves so it wasn't grating). A watchdog service periodically pinged the modem; if the modem was blanking out, the PC would bleep-bloop cute little computer songs until somebody turned the modem on and off.
in retrospect I found computing in this era significantly healthier and more rewarding than the current Internet.