My first computer was a Compaq Deskpro Portable: http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html It didn't take me long to pimp it u

My first computer was a Compaq Deskpro Portable: http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html It didn't take me long to pimp it up with a custom autoexec.bat file and to start playing in BASIC. 10 PRINT "RYAN IS GREAT" 20 GOTO 10 My mom gave me a BASIC manual at some point, and I started working my way through it, learning how to change the screen to paint graphics, load and save data from data files, write subroutines (GOSUB), modularize programs into multiple files, and so on. Soon I was making cheesy, derivative text adventures and space battle games and creating sound effects. I even wrote a rudimentary text editor for school essays, though I eventually supplanted it with the superior VolksWriter. I mostly lost interest in computers during the 1990s, aside from playing around with Midisoft Recording Session, a Yamaha TG-100 and a Tascam 4-track. As such, I completely missed the advent of the World Wide Web. It wasn't until 1999 that I got a laptop and an email address at work, and quickly got excited about this internet thing. My boss asked me if I could make a website for our department and I said, "Sure!" Then I called a friend who was taking computer science at school and asked whether it was hard to make a website. It turned out not to be that hard, and so I gradually found myself turning into a web developer. I remember my boss asking if the site could display summary reports dynamically. I sort-of knew about the existence of server-side preprocessors, so I looked into what we had our web server and discovered ASP. Imagine my surprise to look at the ASP source code and see BASIC staring back at me (albeit with a few objects bolted on). Just recently I managed to get my old BASIC programs working again via DosBox running on Ubuntu.