4 ms·

same here. My first run into with Basic was when I was 6 with an MSX. I was captivated by it but didn't understand what the white letters against the blue backg

same here. My first run into with Basic was when I was 6 with an MSX. I was captivated by it but didn't understand what the white letters against the blue background meant. (MSX was ironically more popular in Asia than America where it was built by Microsoft). Pretty soon I got my own but it was a Korean version of MSX with only games on it. My friend had the MSX with keyboard and he showed me how to type stuff on it but we played games. It was interesting since I began to wonder how these games were made. Then later, I had an old intel 286 with monochrome monitor during the mid to late 90s. No internet, just a thick book about Qbasic from the public library, and me trying to create games on it. The thought of making my own video game was more than enough of an incentive to learn yet to this day I have not achieved it as I keep telling myself it's too hard, too much time. Then came DarkBasic when I was reading PC Gamer in the late 90s and I got so excited about it. Downloaded it over the 56k modem (couple hundred megabytes) and fiddled around with 3d stuff. I learned how to make 3d models with animation in TrueSpace. But never got to make a complete game, just lot of new projects that never went anywhere. The most I got was creating a FPS level using sphere as the 'skybox'. It was so exciting to create my own world using photo textures and add lighting which gave it pretty good look. Gives me a huge shot of nostalgia just thinking about it and other early demos in DarkBasic. The UI was literally had a dark feel to it and that made it even cooler. I've always thought that BASIC had a lot of things right in terms of being newbie friendly, I mean it was easy enough for a 10 year old so. It's what sparked my early interest in programming. Even in the early 2000s we were using Visual Basic in high school, we could create a lot of neat things with it. Gui apps that just sorta worked. Anybody could pick it up and yes, students of all shapes and sizes were able to follow along and create things on their own. Everyone was coding. Compare that with today with the myriad of frameworks and hundreds of different opinions happy to rip each other apart for the sake of ideology. A much less inviting community core (ex. stackoverflow) to new comers asking "dumb" questions and being punished. We seem to be going through a very chaotic period in the development world where Javascript is suddenly king and simplicity and user friendliness is shunned.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
stephengillie 11y ago
Wow I really wish I had gone to your high school. The late 1990s at my high school were just like the late 1980s - each classroom had a computer but we were all too busy doing assignments on paper to ever use it. I didn't get to see VB until college. I used to write games and utilities on my TI-83. It was generally frowned upon, because teachers were afraid they would be used for cheating. Even writing your own program that would compute the Quadratic Equation was banned because it was unfair to students who couldn't.
- curiousjorge 11y ago
  I'm really just tripping on nostalgia right now but fuck it someone might appreciate these details so I'm going to continue. I also remember playing so many good stuff on the Ti-83. We used to download Bubble bobble and even 3d wolfenstein and just slack off. Students did cheat using the Ti-83 by putting formulas and cheat notes. I'm not sure why they didn't ban it. It was expensive at the time too and I lost or broke mine twice. I'm not sure if all Canadian high schools were like ours but we had dedicated courses for learning everything from Qbasic to Maya. I was mad jealous of kids that were creating crazy 3d animations with 3ds max but the class was always filled very fast :(. Had I learned the stuff I might have become a computer graphics artist or something in that area. The course I took taught Visual Basic and then QBasic towards the end (I was like dayum I already know this at age 10, let me play web games while teacher is not looking). At lunch time computer graphics lab hosted Counter Strike (1.3 back then) where you paid a dollar to play for 45 minutes and sometimes after school it would go until for several hours. Like jam packed with 20 people screaming and shouting when somebody got knifed. You couldn't curse tho because the instructor was a hard ass and kicked people out for typing swear words in the chat. Damn, we even had Battlefield 1942 tournaments. Ironically, being in a poorer school meant ton of corporate endorsements and goodies (free Vancouver Grizzlies tickets & free lunch). During the mid 90s when I was in elementary school, our school had everything from Apple II to Imac. Like almost every Mac from different timeline. One of my favorite was a black & white tiny monitor Apple that had Hypercard on it and I used to create something like dragonball Z stick figure animation (obviously inspired by stickdeath.com) on it. Fuck those were good times especially since I didn't have a computer back then and the school provided all these things. In grade 6, our teacher was super supportive of us using technology (he was into tech, even bought a monochrome projector off ebay so he could teach material from the computer). Looking back I can see how fortunate it was to have experienced all these things. I was especially fond of playing games like Lode Runner and Lemonade Stand on the Apple II. Pretty much all of my recess and lunchtime was spent on figuring out 1) find games in dusty bins in school gym 2) figure out how to run it. Our school used to host Zip Zap Map Canada (tetris meets geography) tournaments. At home my dad taught me how to create my own website (so 1997 or 1998) using Netscape Composer (on win 95 or 98) and uploading it to a free host. Used to brag about it and impressed my teacher a lot. I picked up a book on HTML for dummies from the library and started reading about Javascript and Java but these books were in Korean and I had a tough time. Eventually geocities came along and it was day dreaming about making a popular website ( never happened :( ). During this time, we got fresh new iMacs and it was off to the races to find games to run on it, Bugdom, Nanosaur, Sim City Classic & 2000, weird game where you walk around a dungeon and kill monsters and level up. We were also trying to run some weird emulation that supposedly allowed us to play windows games but at super low fps. Everything was going good until one day thieves came in stole all 6~10 iMacs from our classroom. It was shitty but it was also a shitty neighborhood (think Compton without any rap song about it). My grade 6 teacher was really crushed. We got another batch of iMacs and this time we had cables to hold down the iMacs in case someone tried to jack it again and they came in with cable cutters and made off with it AGAIN. Finally they created a dedicated iMac lab on the second floor classroom where thieves couldn't break into. Quite a long thread stemming from BASIC lol.
jbverschoor 11y ago
Sounds like me.. Dutchy? :)
- curiousjorge 11y ago
  van Coevorden is dutch I hear.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

stephengillie 11y ago

Wow I really wish I had gone to your high school. The late 1990s at my high school were just like the late 1980s - each classroom had a computer but we were all too busy doing assignments on paper to ever use it. I didn't get to see VB until college. I used to write games and utilities on my TI-83. It was generally frowned upon, because teachers were afraid they would be used for cheating. Even writing your own program that would compute the Quadratic Equation was banned because it was unfair to students who couldn't.

curiousjorge 11y ago
I'm really just tripping on nostalgia right now but fuck it someone might appreciate these details so I'm going to continue. I also remember playing so many good stuff on the Ti-83. We used to download Bubble bobble and even 3d wolfenstein and just slack off. Students did cheat using the Ti-83 by putting formulas and cheat notes. I'm not sure why they didn't ban it. It was expensive at the time too and I lost or broke mine twice. I'm not sure if all Canadian high schools were like ours but we had dedicated courses for learning everything from Qbasic to Maya. I was mad jealous of kids that were creating crazy 3d animations with 3ds max but the class was always filled very fast :(. Had I learned the stuff I might have become a computer graphics artist or something in that area. The course I took taught Visual Basic and then QBasic towards the end (I was like dayum I already know this at age 10, let me play web games while teacher is not looking). At lunch time computer graphics lab hosted Counter Strike (1.3 back then) where you paid a dollar to play for 45 minutes and sometimes after school it would go until for several hours. Like jam packed with 20 people screaming and shouting when somebody got knifed. You couldn't curse tho because the instructor was a hard ass and kicked people out for typing swear words in the chat. Damn, we even had Battlefield 1942 tournaments. Ironically, being in a poorer school meant ton of corporate endorsements and goodies (free Vancouver Grizzlies tickets & free lunch). During the mid 90s when I was in elementary school, our school had everything from Apple II to Imac. Like almost every Mac from different timeline. One of my favorite was a black & white tiny monitor Apple that had Hypercard on it and I used to create something like dragonball Z stick figure animation (obviously inspired by stickdeath.com) on it. Fuck those were good times especially since I didn't have a computer back then and the school provided all these things. In grade 6, our teacher was super supportive of us using technology (he was into tech, even bought a monochrome projector off ebay so he could teach material from the computer). Looking back I can see how fortunate it was to have experienced all these things. I was especially fond of playing games like Lode Runner and Lemonade Stand on the Apple II. Pretty much all of my recess and lunchtime was spent on figuring out 1) find games in dusty bins in school gym 2) figure out how to run it. Our school used to host Zip Zap Map Canada (tetris meets geography) tournaments. At home my dad taught me how to create my own website (so 1997 or 1998) using Netscape Composer (on win 95 or 98) and uploading it to a free host. Used to brag about it and impressed my teacher a lot. I picked up a book on HTML for dummies from the library and started reading about Javascript and Java but these books were in Korean and I had a tough time. Eventually geocities came along and it was day dreaming about making a popular website ( never happened :( ). During this time, we got fresh new iMacs and it was off to the races to find games to run on it, Bugdom, Nanosaur, Sim City Classic & 2000, weird game where you walk around a dungeon and kill monsters and level up. We were also trying to run some weird emulation that supposedly allowed us to play windows games but at super low fps. Everything was going good until one day thieves came in stole all 6~10 iMacs from our classroom. It was shitty but it was also a shitty neighborhood (think Compton without any rap song about it). My grade 6 teacher was really crushed. We got another batch of iMacs and this time we had cables to hold down the iMacs in case someone tried to jack it again and they came in with cable cutters and made off with it AGAIN. Finally they created a dedicated iMac lab on the second floor classroom where thieves couldn't break into. Quite a long thread stemming from BASIC lol.

jbverschoor 11y ago

Sounds like me.. Dutchy? :)

curiousjorge 11y ago
van Coevorden is dutch I hear.