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From 1988-1991 I lived in a hut in a small African mountain village. No running water or electricity, but I wrote programs on paper and waited with bated breath
by gramie 4y ago
From 1988-1991 I lived in a hut in a small African mountain village. No running water or electricity, but I wrote programs on paper and waited with bated breath for every issue of Byte (several months delayed of course). I would read them from cover to cover a dozen times, perusing every article, every advertisement, every editorial. I remember a listing that created a fern using a short, recursive PostScript program.
About once a month I would journey down to the capital, where -- in exchange for my IT services -- they let me tinker to my heart's content and type in my programs (the only language available, and the only one I knew at the time was GW-BASIC).
- worstestes 4y agoWhoa! Love this story. Do you happen to blog? I and I’m sure many others here on HN would be interested in hearing more details about your journey.
- gramie 4y agoI kept a journal (paper, of course), but in spite of my good intentions I have never digitized it. It was another time, when letter to Canada and back took a month each way (the final 15k on horseback). Now, I hear that there is a cell tower in the village. The country, Lesotho, is unique in many ways. It is completely within South Africa, and 2/3 of the men used to go to the South African mines to work. I'm not sure about now, but they used to have one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world (35% or so). There is also a ski resort (https://afriski.net/ https://afriski.net/). The white colonizers didn't want the land because it was so mountainous -- the lowest point in the country is 1,400m above sea level -- and was not suitable for agriculture, so they let the Africans stay there. Damn, now you have me dreaming about OCRing my journals!
- nuancebydefault 4y agoThat is an amazing story! Did you get paid for your IT services as well?
- gramie 4y agoI never thought of getting paid for it. The chance to "play" on a beefy (for the time) Intel 80286 computer) was all the compensation I needed! If I remember correctly, I wrote a GW-BASIC program to decode WordPerfect macros, allow them to be edited as text, and re-encode them.
- ncmncm 4y agoI found the original "C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchie ("K&R") at my university bookstore in, maybe, 1980. I read it cover to cover twice on a plane flight, memorizing it, and immediately recognized its superiority over Pascal as it existed then. Everyone who made a Pascal extended it, incompatibly with everybody else, to try to match C. Any of those would have sufficed, but none could win.