| It's Bill Gates' fault. I had an Atari ST. It had a simple, elegant GUI desktop and there was no reason for me to ever stop playing Uninvited or drawing in DeluxePaint. I would have been about 9. I'd save up my pocket money and buy $20 imported ST Format magazines with headlines like 'ATARI VS AMIGA: WHO WILL INHERIT THE FUTURE OF COMPUTING', and read about MIDI and DTP. Everything worked so I had nothing to fix. Alas the ST broke. And it turned out neither Atari nor Amiga inherited the future of computing - nobody made games for Atari ST anymore. I got a 286 12 running DOS 3 from my mum, and was plunged into boot disk hell trying to free that precious 640K of RAM for my games. I started editing batch files and using 'errorlevel' to make little menus so I could use less floppies (they were expensive). Then I had a 386 where the video card slipped out all the time. So I opened the case and slipped it back in. I eventually got a feel for hardware. The computer teachers at high school were terrible. I didn't like logo, as I couldn't see anything practical. We learnt Pascal later, but the teacher was always away, so we learnt from the internet and another kid who showed us. I read a lot of computer magazines. I wanted to write for computer magazines. I finished high school and did a certificate in business management the same year. I did an MCSE at 17, got into tweaking a lot, then found Linux, the tweakers dream. Tweaking lead to scripting, scripting leads to hacking. I'm actually really glad I got into Linux then, and I'm glad I stuck with it. At that time, everybody was talking about Win32 and Visual Studio. It seemed like you had to have an MSDN subscription to make software that was considered desirable by the masses. Now the internet is considered the biggest part of computing, and more often or not it's based on OSS toolsets and languages. PS. Atari rocks all over Amiga. :^P |