[stephengillie]

The first PC videogame I ever saw was a gorilla throwing a barrel at buildings. It was written in BASIC and came with our 286 back in 1989. I was really excited to learn how the monkey was drawn - out of the same ASCII blocks as everything else, obviously, but how? - and excitedly opened the file in a text editor.

It was a little overwhelming to my 7-year-old self to see just how many little subroutines and subprocesses were needed make the whole program work. It was a very complicated set of math processes, not unlike how a car engine is a very complicated set of physical processes. (I'd been helping with car repairs for a few years at this point, and rigged-up a pair of copper wires between the cable box and TV once when we only had 1 coax cable.)

Several years later, I was overjoyed to find the TI-82 calculators we were loaned in school could interpret the same BASIC commands, and happily started writing tiny utilities, competing with classmates for the coolest function, and joining debates about whether pre-programming the Quadratic Equation into a calculator counts as cheating on tests.

Despite setbacks like a lack of programming education in rural WA State in the early 1990s, that monkey throwing barrels planted the seed that made me want to write and understand software.

[snerbles]

Gorillas for QBASIC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)

[bigger_cheese]

MSDOS 5 used to come with QBASIC. Nibbles and Gorillas were great games and they included all the source code.

I used to play Gorilla's all the time when I was a kid. That was how I learnt about angles. My Dad drew a picture for me "This is 90 degrees, This is 45 degrees" it used to sit beside the computer.

I learnt a lot about programming from the DOS environment come to think of it. Our home PC used to have a text based menu program it would boot into. In order to add a program to the menu you needed to edit it, using something like a markup language. My Dad used to sit over my shoulder and talk me through adding programs to the menu.

[igravious]

Oh my God. That takes me waaay back. I had totally forgotten about that.