My Humble Beginnings
I first began programming [BASIC] back in 1985 on my brand new [Atari 65XE]. I had the [1050 floppy drive] with a bootable Atari version of DOS 3, a few books like the one pictured to the right, and even a [cassette tape drive], oh yeah! This thing was macked out and ready to receive my expert keystrokes. I crafted such gems as Alphabet Soup, American Flag, and my crowning achievement Revenge of the Tykes, a text based adventure game with line drawings of the scenery. I even created my own peripheral device-- a cushion that informed the computer when you sat down or stood up. I used it to automatically pause games and restart them according to posterior placement.Soon, I became bored with the plodding execution of my programs. I wondered why everything I wrote was so slow, while cartridge games were blazingly fast.
A little research revealed that it was something mystical called machine code comprised entirely of numbers being PEEK'd and POKE'd different places in RAM. I decided I was ready to learn it, blissfully ignorant of the difficulties that lie ahead.It took a full ten years before my brain had grown enough ICs to fully comprehend machine code in all its glory. I became a rare aficionado of machine/assembly languages. I devoured systems manuals for different microprocessors, chipsets, architectures, anything. I must admit, it was my drug of choice. I got no end of pleasure from cyber-walking into nerd chatrooms and settling long standing esoteric arguments about the internal workings of things like DOS memory allocation interrupts. I knew the answers. I had been there in the very heart of the black-box matreshka all the way down to the electrons tunnelling across silicon depletion barriers. I had entered the inner sanctum. I had found transcendental union with [Turing completeness]. And I had reemerged from my caffeine powered techno-cave to walk among normal people.
