Gergely Polonkai

You have to believe in things that are not true. How else would they become?

Oct 14, 2019

Thatʼs an interesting story. Back in 1997, at the age of 14, i wrote the controlling software of a military space station.

Oh, wait. You didʼt know such a thing exists? Well, maybe i just disclosed a super secret military Intel. Or i was just under the mind blowing effect of contemporary cartoons like Space Ghost and Swat Cats that it became somewhat a reality to me. I have a vivid fantasy to date.

When i was 11 i got a Commodore 64. The PC with 286 (or maybe even 386) CPUs was already available, but we could not afford it. So i wrote funny programs that didnʼt do anything interesting. Also these were ephemeral as i didnʼt know how to write these programs to the tape. My school had a faculty for PC usage where we even learned the basics of BASIC (pun intended) but i could not use much of my QBasic knowledge at home.

Then in 1995 we moved to a bigger town, where we even had a class to learn awesome things like word processing (using WordPerfect) and tabular data editing (using Quattro Pro). We didnʼt learn programming here, but the DOS basics came really handy when i got my first XT and then a 286. I continued to learn QBasic (and later QuickBasic) by reading the sources of the example programs shipped with them.

At the end, i wrote an awesome (at least for myself and my cousin) control panel for our imaginary military space station. It knew our coordinates (X, Y, and Z, relative to 0, 0, 0 which was, conveniently, the position of Earth). I remember sending it to my cousin on a Floppy disk. However, we never had the chance to use it together, as my grandparents, where we spent most our time together, didnʼt have a computer.

Roxanne Franco

self-made and self-taught developer still under construction

Oct 14, 2019

This is such an amazing story!! I've never heard of any programmer's experience in the 90's even if you were just kid playing with logics - I'm actually still learning about the modern coding so it's amazing to imagine coding back in the 90's! Thank you so much for sharing this!!

Roxanne Franco it wasnʼt too much of a difference, really. Hardware, for one, didnʼt change too much, it just became faster (well, much faster; my first computer had an awesome 10 MHz CPU and 256 kB of RAM. Today i often work with machines with 4 or 8 CPUs, 3000-3500 MHz each, and millions of kb RAM, with 32 GB being easily achievable). But i can still run my old BASIC programs in QBasic on the newest hardware, programs that were written 25+ years ago, without problems.

Languages are a different story, though. I wouldnʼt be able to get far with BASIC today. Even developing in C (which was available at the time, i just couldnʼt put my hand on a compiler yet) is slow in todayʼs terms. Languages that can take advantage of the faster hardware, the wider native instruction set (ie. the commands you send directly to the CPU), are much better and more desirable, obviously.

The key thing i got from learning it that early is that i know how things work under the hood. After BASIC i went for Pascal, and there were some things, like handling the mouse pointer, that were achievable only by using Assembly. Assembly is the closest you can get to the CPU code and still remain (somewhat) readable. With that language you can directly access the CPU cache, the memory, and pretty much any hardware you have in your computer. This way you learn how memory is laid out, how the CPU interpret your commands, so you can truly optimise for performance. With todayʼs high level languages you are barely in control.

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