pamela 🧡 @pamela@bsd.network

@pamela I first read the book "The Cuckoo's Egg" when I was 9 or 10, and I realized I could work with computers without having to do programming. I've always been more interested in running the system, than writing random things for it.

Trivia: The hero was from Berkeley, I was born almost in Berkeley. The bad-guy was from Hannover, Hannover was the first place I moved to outside the USA. I used to drink beer with a guy that saw the bad-guy get arrested for his actions from the story.

I am now a proud patron of Michael W (Warren) Lucas (@mwlucas) on @patreon, and you should be too: #NewPatron

https://www.patreon.com/mwlucas

@pamela

I still have not quite come to terms with my failure to realize my ambition to write a Z80 assembler for my Timex Sinclair 1000.

@pamela I remember buying these slim little books that each contained an AppleSoft basic game that you could type in. I distinctly remember buying one that had a space invaders game and that was my first foray into programming when I was like 8. I can’t imagine a better introduction to computing :)

@pamela the Nintendo Power Glove was a big one for me - I was convinced that amazing worn interfaces were going to be everywhere, each trying to outdo the rest. Some of the current gen AR is getting close to what I wanted the 1990s to be ;)

@pamela
I didn't really get to experience computers and the internet until Windows XP was dominating the market, so what wound up sending me down into this Wonderland was playing countless hours of the "Megaman: Battle Network" series games on my GameBoy Advance. The idea of whole worlds full of information readily accessible, just waiting to be explored has fascinated me ever since.

@pamela Long distance calls to CompuServe to play a space battle game.

I have created a #Librepay account for donations to me. I intend to use any monies to cover my open-source work, and for hosting this instance. https://liberapay.com/phessler/

Since donations through the service are anonymous, I don't know if, or how much, people have donated.

@pamela
When I read Neuromancer back in the '80s

@pamela My Dad bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III with 48K RAM and I learned how to program in BASIC.

I spent hours typing in programs, learning how they worked, and changed them.

I'm a #sysadmin now but I still love to program.

@pamela I spent the entirety of the year in my high school physics class writing an RPG engine in TI-BASIC.

By the end of that year it rocked lol. Had support for moving the party around a world map, random battles, stats, inventory, NPCs with dialog. All it needed was a story >.<

To this day, I know zero physics.

@pamela A computing architecture (CPU/hardware, OS, programming language, etc) that a single person could understand from top to bottom.

@pamela I had a TI-99/4A my parents bought me at the tender age of five. I was so into that thing, learning hex before most kids knew their alphabets so I could make my own sprites, making all kinds of games.

I still have the tattered Extended BASIC manual on my bookshelf, but the computer was sadly lost to Mom's attic.

@pamela oh god, so many bits.

Probably playing around with ResEdit to the point where I'm changing the games I played. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit

In short, I spent far too much time trying to do stupid things to computers. I still do.