How I got into tech
This could have been a part of my post regarding coincidences but somehow it deserves a dedicated post.
There used to be a large store close to where I grew up in Vienna called Gerngross, it went broke meanwhile but some version of it reopened somewhere else. I was kind of a mall, and we didn’t have many malls in the city back then. One floor, or at least half of it was dedicated to toys and kids stuff. I loved strolling around the toy section and see what’s new, dream of fun I would have with all those things, but never really buying something. It might seem weird these days to just hang out as a kid in a toy store for multiple hours, but back then this was normal. No phones, no internet, just boring TV. It was either meeting friends outside or hang out in shops. Reminds me also of the time being in Australia, when I went shopping to the mall with my parents and they just dropped me off at the toy store, that wasn’t a child care, just a regular toy store. And I would probably hand out there what felt like hours and tried everything that was allowed to try and sometime convinced my parents to buy things. But I’m getting off track here, back to Vienna and Gerngross.
The Wood carver
One day they had something similar to the Playmat 4 in 1 Seems to now still exist under the name Playmake 4 in 1 workshop. I so badly wanted that workshop. I had no Idea what I would make, but thought I could create so much with it. I stressed my parents for days, weeks, probably even months for this. One day, can’t recall what occasion (Birthday, Christmas, something else), my step-mom (Carmen) went with me to the store to see what the fuss is all about. After examining it for a while, she told me that it’s not really the best thing, I would use it for a while and forget about it very quick, I should better get a computer. I didn’t ever think to even ask for something like that and I was mind blown, existed to the max that I am getting a game console. My cousin used to have a Sega in Australia and now I was about to get a game console! Awesome.
The game console
Off we went across the street to another shop that had also computer stuff. That shop, meanwhile also bankrupt and doesn’t exist anymore in Austria, was called Foto Nettig. They had the Sega on display and proudly I presented it to my step-mom full of excitement and hopeful I am finally getting a game console and imagining all the awesome games I could play. Oh kid, were you up for a disappointment … Carmen looked at it, asked me if I can do anything else on it than play. Well, no, it’s a game console. It’s just for games. This didn’t fly by Carmen and she told me it has to be something with a keyboard where I could also “do” something. I didn’t know much about computers, I was 12. All I knew was from class mates, strolling through shops and what I’ve heard while still being in Australia, so all that came to my mind was a C64. She asked the sales person at the store but they had no C64 on stock. So off we went, to the next store.
The C64
Just 5 min away was another store, Niedermayer, which by now you might now what follows, went bankrupt and doesn’t exist anymore in Austria. It’s not my fault, honestly! There, finally, a C64 - Batman edition.
It still came with the Datasette even though models with floppy disks existed, but I didn’t know better and was too excited that I am getting a computer where I can play games on. I played that Batman game for quite a while and loved it, even though the graphics judged by today’s standards are really bad.
The thing with the Datasette might have been a further puzzle piece which set something in motion that lead to what I am today. Let me explain, it might be a bit hard to understand for younger people or people who didn’t have games loading from a cassette. The cassette, unlike the floppy, was very, very veeeery slow. Today you tap “install” in an app-store and a few seconds later you have the app on your phone. Loading a game from Datasette took AGES, even though the games were very small. You had to insert the cassette, enter a command, hit the play button and then … wait. For quite a few minutes until the game started. I don’t recall how many minutes exactly it took, but it was looooong. I required a lot of patience.
Then there was this level I kept failing in the game after which the game told me to rewind the cassette, and press a button once done. One day I asked myself, what would happen if I just didn’t rewind, just hit a button on the keyboard as if I would have reminded. To my amazement, the game continued, multiple levels after the level I kept failing and I was blown away that I could do that. This made me curious, what else could I do?
So there was another game, a very very simple game where I had to fly a spaceship through a cave, you git the cave wall, you were dead. Loading a game back then looked like this:
First checking what is on the device.
LOAD "$",8
Then loading the game with another command.
And finally using the RUN command to run the game.
But, there was also a LIST command, which for some game that where written in basic meant that you could see the source code, modify it and then run the modified version.
So I decided to do exactly that, load it, modify it creating a path through the cave mountains, then running it.
It was a tedious task, there was no mouse, no fancy editor to modify the source, it was a lot of typing and patience, lot’s of patience.
But I was a kid, I had time. And once again, curiosity won and I was playing the modified version of the game where I could finish without touching the walls.
The final straw
Back then, computers came with a proper instruction manual. Loading games was not just clicking, you had to write commands and there was no one the could do it for me or explain it to me. My only option was to read the manual. The manual however had also something else. A introduction into programming Basic. I started reading, I started typing, and the computer executed the program I created. I was so excited and at the same time hooked.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it’s because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn’t like me… Or feels threatened by me… Or thinks I’m a smart ass… Or doesn’t like teaching and shouldn’t be here…
This is from the Hacker’s Manifesto, written in 1986. I had no idea about hacking, or the internet at that time. But reading these lines now, is exactly the feeling I had back then. I could “do” things. I could just come up with ideas, and start coding them. I didn’t need anything except patience and time. No material, nothing physical, just my mind, the manual to learn more and time. This absolutely changed everything for me. I was fascinated by what I could do and wanted to learn more, understand more, do more. But it was around 1990, maybe 1991? I can’t remember. But there was no google, no browser, not even internet as we know it today and barely anyone had a computer at home. I asked at school, but most where just playing but still picked up informations like a sponge where ever I could find something. I spent days and weeks coding new things. Once I started some animation of my name, absolute useless you might say but I was just captured and doing a bit every day.
My first PC
At some point, I got a used PC. A PC-XT 8088, with a whopping 512KB memory (this is half of a megabyte) and something around 4Mhz CPU. It had a hard drive of about 10-20MB and a 5 1/4” Floppy drive.
For all you youngsters out there. Let me put this in perspective. The thing was huge, around 15kg!
Taking a smartphone these days 8Gb memory (this is, if I didn’t calculate wrong 16384x more memory than my old PC) and the CPU’s these days are running at speeds above 3Ghz. That means 1Ghz = 1000Mhz, 1000x times faster, at least than my old PC.
The monitor was black and white, or rather green on black. No colors, Just text.
And there was still no internet, this computer had no manual. I was just shown something called PC Tools or similar, I really don’t remember.
I even hard to “park” the hard drive heads before shutting down the computer!
Everything I wanted to learn had to come from someone I could ask or read something somewhere. I kept a piece of paper with questions, and since my parents had a restaurant, they called me downstairs every time two guys showed up that knew their way around computers and I took my piece of paper and asked away. New question came up? I had to wait, a week, maybe to, maybe longer.
When I couldn’t ask, I started to experiment. Take it apart, break it, fixing it, putting it back together. I was curious and wanted to know. What is it? How does it work?
There was no body who could have put it together, if I broke it, I had to fix it.
I also started playing around with the software. What does this do? What happens if I do this? What happens if I remove the COMMAND.COM? Well, that wasn’t smart, my computer couldn’t start anymore.
Took me a few days, to create a floppy at school where we had some computers which allowed me to start my computer from floppy again. Took me even longer to learn how to fix it again.
When I finally got into IT School in 1993, getting access to documentations, the internet (still without google or web browsers), this is when things really got interesting. Getting access to knowledge. Most teachers where unfortunately useless, a few of us learnt coding based on books I organized to do a bulk purchase. We found documentations on the internet that explained graphics programming. Asphyxia comes to mind. Some person in South Africa writing documentations and publishing them. I have no clue how we found this stuff, but we did. And where waiting like a bunch of kids awaiting Christmas for the next instructions and documentations. Reading them over and over and coding what was written in the examples and doing our own thing as well. Learning about our school network and ways to send alerts to other computers, features reserved for administrators but once we learnt how to program them, we just wrote our own tools. Getting more informations on BBSes like KaraNet. These were already BBS that were running on the internet and not like the BBS in the 80s running behind phone lines. Still similar idea of text based knowledge sharing.
These early days led to what I am today. This curiosity that pushes me to try things, learn things to be able to understand how they work. This combined with the childish nativity and not asking the question what could possibly go wrong. Just doing it to see the outcome. This also comes with some potential downsides. You can break something of course, but also get in trouble with your school. I wrote about how I got in trouble with my school a few years back. This combined with my lack of motivation to learn anything that didn’t spark my curiosity led to me dropping out of school in 1995, however 31 Years later. I am still doing IT, still curious, unfortunately much less time and much less patience than back then, but still enjoying it mostly.
There would be many more stories to tell from my path that led me here. But these are stories for another time.
What I can leave you with is to find what triggers your curiosity. What makes you forget time and space and so excited you forget everything around you. Find that thing, explore it, grow it. Be that naive little kid that thinks “I wonder what this button does” and just see what happens.
Just imagine if would have gotten that wood ting, where would I be today if Carmen wouldn’t have made the decision to get a computer?
PS: That photo was my first computer, I build it myself, piece by piece every moth what I could afford, was 16 back then. And you guessed it, the company I bought the parts from “Birg Computer”, does not exist anymore.
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