The Early Days
Computers have been a big part of my life since tenth grade. Actually, they had been also back in sixth grade. I did a bunch of BASIC programming on the Apple IIe computers in my classroom. That didn't last, though, since I went into a school with no computers at all starting in seventh grade.
The first big project I ever worked on was with a friend, and it was called Operation D.U.D. Rocket. It was a little program (well, little is relative... it was close to a thousand lines of code...) written in Apple IIe BASIC which showed a rocket blasting off and exploding in space. We never actually got to the end of the program. We didn't know much about programming, and we had a total of one subroutine, to draw the fire at the thrusters. We manualy redrew each cloud as it got lower on screen! All this was in 40x24 extra-low resolution graphics.
The OES Years
In ninth and tenth grade I started getting more into computers again. In ninth, that mostly involved using a drawing program called "Splash". It was a cool program, probab;y the best palette-based (256 color) drawing program I've ever used. I would still use it today if it could read in and write out a standard format. It uses its own proprietary format, though, so I can't do much with it. If anyone has any information on the Splash file format, please email me .
In tenth grade I took a Turbo Pascal programming class. This was my first introduction to structured programming. I developed bad programming habits, though, since I learned almost entirely from the online help. I can't think of a single program that came out of my work in that class that's worth anything. I think I wrote an AD&D character generator which I thought was pretty spiffy at the time. I came back to it later, though, and discovered that it was so full of bugs that it was pretty much unuseable.
I also started work on a little game. It was based on a game I had liked on the Apple IIe, and I thought I could handle it. Well, lemme tell you, I wasn't. It was way too slow to do anything with, so I scrapped it before the basic routines were even finished.
That Pascal class was one of the few good things about ninth and tenth grade, though. It re-introduced me to computers and programming both of which I had really enjoyed back in elementary school. It gave me an outlet in a school where I didn't really feel like I belonged.
The Netherlands and C
I went to the Netherlands for a year between 10th and 11th grade. While I was there I had next to no social life, and I spent all my time on the computer. One of the teachers had a slow 386 computer (I think it was a 386, that is...). a few months into the year, he told me that he was going to get a C compiler. I said to myself, "What an oportunity! Now I can learn C!" I had heard a lot about how great a language C was, so I was enthused to learn it.
I went out and got a book to teach me the language. In about a month, I was all the way through this six or seven hundred page book and gnawing at the bit to start programming. The compiler wasm't there yet, so I could only do things in my imagination. I wrote a little program to draw a triangle in text with nothing to test it on. When the compiler finally arrived, I was more than excited. It was Borland C++ v3.0 for DOS. I felt like now that I had a real compiler and a real programming language and some real programming style (which I had aquired from the book), I was ready to write a real program.
I took this oportunity to go back to that game I had started but never finished. I was actually able to do it this time, and the result was The Adventures of Snakey Bob .
Northwest School
After coming back from Holland, I went back to the school I had attended for middle school. For a while I was without a computer. I was lucky enough to be able to borrow one from one of the teachers, though. It was a Compaq Deskpro. I wasn't able to run any C compiler on that computer (at least none that I had), since it wasn't a 386. I made do with Turbo Pascal for that year. Again, I don't think anythig came out of that year, except perhaps some experimentation with fractals.
I finally got my own computer in 12th grade. It was a hand-me-down 486-dx33, and it was great. I still have the fondest place in my heart for that computer. My current computer felt like an empty shell when I first got it compared to my 486.
Lewis & Clark
I originally went to Lewis & Clark College for two years. I was a computer science major (though I always responded that I was undecided if anyone asked me). I learned my computer science stuff, and life was pretty hum-drum.
In my sophomore year I did an independent study project. I made a compiler for
a language I made up which describes animation mathematically. I never really
came up with a name for the project, but I suppose that's not overly important.
I even had beta testers, but they never really did anything. The thing came
out pretty nicely. It could do some pretty cool stuff, such as this one I did
recently of a walking man.
University of Oregon
On the advice of my mentor at an internship at Tektronix , I transfered to the University of Oregon after two years at Lewis & Clark. So far I haven't done many computer classes there, but I have worked on a few small projects of my own.
- Domino Digital Logic
- Visprint
- C-Robots
Yes, you heard right. Along with a friend, I developed a system to use dominoes to perform computations. So far we've successfully completed an XOR circuit :)
This is the program which generated the little image at the bottom left of all my web pages. It creates a visual fingerprint based on he contents of a file.
My most recent project. My current plan is to redo the classic game C-Robots with a really nice, modern interface -- faboo graphics, sound, and other stuff like that.
