I grew up in china, my family was among the first families to get a home computer in China, thanks to my parents (They worked in Germany and brought one back).

I grew up in china, my family was among the first families to get a home computer in China, thanks to my parents (They worked in Germany and brought one back). many of my classmates got their first computers at their high school age. but we got a 486dx33 when I was in elementary school (around 94 I think). But the machine was new to my parents too, they couldn’t provide any CS education to me. I was mainly exploring it myself. it has few games pre-installed, I spent a great amount of time on them. I also created lots of art works with the paint program of win3.2. I was sent to a student club and then later a weekend school to learn programming. both of them were targeting ACM contest, the only usage of computer those Chinese educators could think of. I hated programming, I couldn’t get it at all. Then in junior high, I met with another student who not only had a computer but also had network at home. I don’t know if it’s internet, I didn’t have a chance to see it or try it. He basically described it to me when we had breaks during the PE class. It seems to have a BBS system, and tons of pirated games. One game he told me was about building a Mars colony and that game blew me away. I soon fell in love with games and then QBasic. I spent lots of time creating images and animations with QB. I worked for three days without sleeping to duplicate a Mario game. I probably didn’t even know the name collision detection. I just solved everything my own ways. I didn’t have any hard time deciding which major to take in college, it must be CS. My interests in CS have changed over the years, from gaming to computer graphics to entrepreneurship. But I still love computer very much. I really want to thank my parents for all these. Even they don’t know too much about technology, they have done their best to expose it to me. I remember when we wanted to purchase a second computer because our 486dx33 was too old, I asked for a voodoo card with two chips (along with many other high-end parts). The machine was quite expensive (about $2000) and was a lot to ask from them (because of the salary level in China at that time). But they never said so.