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A brief walk down memory lane reveals insight as to how I became involved with computer programming.
I have been writing programs since the age of 11. My first computer was an
Olivetti L1 M20, a moderately
powerful business computer with a 16-bit Zilog Z8001 CPU that ran the PCOS operating system. My brother Jamie and I were fascinated
by this new toy and we spent countless hours reading the source code for several applications that came with the
computer.
In time, we became quite proficient in the variant of BASIC that came bundled with
the OS, and we wrote quite a number of applications including a library catalog system,
some business software, an interpreter for the PILOT language and a few games.
It didn't take long before we discovered assembly language, especially since the manuals
contained pretty much everything we needed to learn. In those days, when you bought a computer,
you expected it to come with full hardware and programming references. It certainly made
the task of learning all about the internals of the machine much quicker and more thorough.
The Olivetti was a solid computer that stood up well to the rigours of four kids thrashing on
it continually. The keyboard was the first to go, but we repaired that by replacing the plastic
pins that made contact with the switches under the keys with home-made metal ones. This repair
wasn't permanent, however, and it became a common task to boot up the machine, determine which
keys didn't work, perform the repairs and then get on with whichever task you had to do. It became
quite tedious and in time our use of the Olivetti waned.
A short while later, my parents took notice of our plight and bought us an IBM PS/1
personal computer, a 10mhz 286 in 1990. In many ways, the PS/1 was a great computer, apart from the unusual step of housing the power supply in the
monitor (which I never fully understood), but it was nice to be one of the first to actually have a colour screen.
Myself, along with my brothers and our friend Alastair, spent countless hours playing games, particularly the
incredibly popular Sierra games - SpaceQuest, KingsQuest, PoliceQuest, as well as many other gaming hits
of the time including the popular Commander Keen, Cosmo, Paganitzu (there was one level that didn't work properly,
so I cracked the savegame file to skip over it), Crystal Caves (this game was awesome!), Duke Nukem and Wolfenstein.
Oh yes, and I wrote a lot of software. In 1990, a friend of the family, Kevin Brandon, took notice
of my unquenchable interest in computers and recommended that I try out the programming language Pascal.
He arranged with my parents to get me a brand-new copy of Borland's Turbo Pascal 6.0. Overcome with excitement,
I examined every component of the software, and subsequently spent two very frusterating months trying to
learn the language. Pascal is an odd language, and it took me some time to learn it to a degree where
I was proficient enough that I could write most anything I wanted. It actually took me quite a long time,
because I soon discovered the beauty of inline assembler, and learned x86 assembler also.
I used Turbo Pascal 6 as my primary programming language for nearly 12 years and wrote over 100 applications,
including the prototype iaNett search engine in 1998. The CGI library I wrote for Pascal in the mid '90s wasn't
very glamourous by today's standards, but it worked; and there's something nostalgic about writing part of
your web application in assembler.
By the late '90s, I had discovered Perl, and became fairly proficient in that language. Perl is a great language,
and incredibly powerful, but it didn't suit my programming style. Nonetheless, I used it for a number of years
until I discovered the newly released PHP 3.0 - introduced to me by my friend Wes Koopmans. At first, I didn't think
much of it, and continued to use Perl for some time. But it grew on me, particularly the ease of which someone could
embed the code directly into the HTML. There was a brief time where I built web pages using both PHP and Perl, but in time,
PHP won out. With the release of PHP 4 in 2000, I never looked back. I have been using PHP ever since - even for desktop
applications! The power of PHP is almost limitless, and I've used it for so long that I feel very comfortable writing
nearly anything using it. The one major exception is my search engine project; although I use PHP where I can, ultimately,
an interpreted language like PHP is unfortunately far too slow.
What language I will use in the future is hard to tell, but I can almost guarantee that I will continue to use PHP
for many years to come. The only thing missing is a true executable compiler; I'd pay good money for that.
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