Ken's Programming Tips

In the Beginning...

My first exposure to technology was a game system that played Pong. I can't recall which of the hundred versions of pong systems I had, but I don't see it listed among the known producers listed at http://www.pong-story.com. The next system was the Atari 2600 (which rocked!) and much later the Atari 5200 (we only had maybe a half dozen cartridges).

My first computer was the Commodore Vic 20 (1980) and I started programming. Since there weren't disk drives for those things, I had to write down the code I figured out. Sometime later we got a tape drive and I was able to save the programs on 30 minute audio tapes. I later moved on to the Commodore 64 (1982) and the 5.25" floppy drives.

BBSs and chat rooms and Fidonet ... oh my!

I later joined the PC bandwagon buying a 286 (1984) and got a 2400 baud modem. Back then there was not public internet, so we had bulletin boards. Bulletin boards were systems that had message boards, program downloads, and text based and ANSI graphic games. Back then popular games was Risk, LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon) and Planets: TEOS. The latter two you can STILL buy (they have a "PC version", in case you can't find a BBS file format to try it out.) They're $15 each which is a little overpriced for old Skool ANSI graphics. There's screenshots of the LORD v4.00 at Moby Games. I played the 2.0 version, which didn't have any ANSI graphics. For those missing the LORD days, check out this online version called Legend of the Green Dragon.

Anyway, BBSs were only local. People you talked to were in the same town as you or close enough anyway. At first we only could call the BSSs that were in town (all three of them) without paying long distance charges. About 6 months later, everything from my town to Hartford, CT became a local call, which opened up a world of 100 BBSs. Some even had multiple modem connections and chat rooms! So, we can talk to people in real time! There were also Fidonet, the precursors to news groups. Messages you wrote on one bulletin board in a BBS got sent to another one. So, at times you'd see messages from people from other states or even other countries. Yes, this was before the Internet! By then 9600 baud modems were common and 14400 modems were FAST and 20 meg hard drives were $10 a meg!

We're a movin' on up!

I later got a 386 (1986), 486 SX (1991), 486 DX2 (1994), and various Pentiums. I ran my own bulletin board for a few years and have created various websites starting way back when HTML just came out. I now use HTML, CSS, and know some PHP. I've written programs in BASIC, Turbo Pascal, Informix 4GL, Assembler, C, C++, C#, and Java as well as created DOS and UNIX shell scripts. I've written applications that read/write/update data from Informix, Sybase, Oracle, and MySQL. Most of my development is for school (I'm working on a Masters in Computer Science) and work. Right now, I barely have time to update my website. Once I finish my masters, I should have more time to play around with OpenGL and Flash.