| This article makes me nostalgic. Sometime in 1994 or 1995, my immigrant dad bought us a Packard Bell machine. He couldn’t afford it, and I’m not sure what drove him to make the purchase. I do know he used a credit card, couldn’t make the payments, and it was one of a few purchases that destroyed his credit. This thing sat in its cardboard packaging for at least 6-9 months. My dad had no idea how to set it up, and his English wasn’t good enough to just read the manual I guess. When I was in first grade, one of my dads friends came over and helped my dad set it up. They installed AOL. My dad gave my older sibling the password but wouldn’t share tell me. The first time I used the computer, I spent a good hour I think staring at Mighty Morphin Power Rangers content on the “Kids Only” AOL channel. This literally changed my life. I learned HTML when I was in the 3rd grade. The next year, I learned PHP because all of the cool Quake 3 clans had web pages where you could post updates without having to change HTML and re upload files over FTP. By 5th grade, all the cool people on IRC (Dalnet or EFNet I think) were talking about object oriented PHP. I learned how to write objects in PHP, although OOP didn’t really make sense to me. I remember using some library to add my Quake 3 clan’s logo as a watermark on images I would upload to our website. As a kid growing up in the 1990s with both of my parents being alive then, it was truly a different time. I believed I could accomplish just about anything. By 1999/2000, I knew I’d wanted to do something with computers when I grew up. By 2001/2002, I was poking around in Java a bit. Unfortunately I didn’t really learn much computer science until college. And I didn’t really appreciate data structures and design until really starting my career. Sometimes I do wonder how things could have been different if I was born in the 70s or 80s. |
Many late hours, trying to keep up.
You did very well, I think.