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11:57:23 PM
Wednesday
Sep 08
| The Early Years OVERVIEW: I have been writing software since I was in kindergarten and feel deeply rooted to the history of computing when it comes to painting pixels on the screen and performing calculations. For an example, web development has actually not seen many radical changes since 1998 when the W3C at MIT developed the standards. Since then it has all been about which browsers support which components of the W3C standards, and how well they do. It has taken years for the browser developers to fully respect the standards, it can also take years for a developer to learn to respect the standards when writing their own code. Gradually in time, the open source community developed jQuery which is helping to solidify descrepancies between javascript & various web browsers. Internet Radio & Video Streaming has been accomplished well since ~1998, I am not sure why we chose to build so many considerably tacky sites like hamsterdance for the first 5 or 10 years of the GUI Web. The year I was born, pacman made his debut. I actually got to play it for the first time on Christmas Eve when I was 4. My brother and I both received handheld video games that were bulky and shaped like a miniature arcade game. These handheld games used either C or D batteries, if you can remember those. When I was about 6 my Mom came home one day with an obsolete personal computer, this machine had no floppy disk - it saved to cassette tape. To make matters worse, you had to use a butter knife to keep the play button pressed. We were able to acquire dozens of applicable computer books for cheap. Every one of these books were about BASIC programming. It seemed like the operating system on that machine was nothing more than a version of the BASIC language interpreter. I spent hours, if not days, typing code verbatim from a book just to see a simple drawing/animation, play a simple game or sometimes something informational like an inventory management system for your music album collection. Its amazing just how many things regarding computing or software development today that are seriously no different from how they were back then. I think the best gift I ever received for Christmas one year was a "learn how to type" kiosk. It was a puzzle game to me and I was soon typing 30 to 60 words per minute. I was fortunate to have some other systems than the TRS-80. I had a Nintendo Entertainment System and a Commodore 64 personal computer. The Commodore was 16 color and played cartridge ROMs as well as could read/write data to either floppy or cassette. I even had a camcorder that saved black and white video data to cassette tape. I had tv-top system that was basically a joystick for using a primitive graphic manipulation program - man that toy got boring fast.
Give a listen to my music...
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Skills:
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