I'm John(english equivalent to my name), and am new here to steemit, a colleague of mine introduced me to it, and found it to be quite interesting to say the least.
A little bit about myself, I am 27 years old tech geek, gamer, movie enthusiast, free speech advocate and avid drummer, the list could go on, but this is not a datasheet for the NSA(lol).
I've always been fascinated with tech, and computers especially, when I was a kid they were more or less magic, so naturally, they made me curious as to how they worked.
To put things in perpective, my first computer was a Romanian built computer ICE Felix HC 2000 which ran solely on floppy disks.
(For the younger ones here, it's this "Save" button)
The great(user-not-friendly) thing about this was that there no such thing as GUI, it was all command line, so if I wanted to play some games, I would have to read the manual, and learn how to use it. And so, I discovered that you could actually do programming on it, I looked in the bundle of disks it came with and saw that there was a disk containing a programming language Turbo Pascal.
On it I started making simple things like sheets where it would ask you for your name, age and hobbies:
Hello,
My name is Pascal, and I would like to get to know you.
I am 1 day old, and I like games.
How about you?
What is your name?
"Ionel"
How old are you?
"30"
What do you like to do?
"go fishing"
After you would answer its questions it would print out(on the screen)
Hello Pascal,
Nice to meet you. My name is Ionel, I am 30 years old, and I like to go fishing.
Simple, and "insulting" by today's standard to call this programming, but for a kid like me, it was pure magic.
My father bought this for me because it would be better than getting a console which at the time, the king of consoles was the Sega Genesis, but being that I live in Eastern Europe, it was not available, what was available however, was the chinese NES ripoff, the... TA TA TUM TA TUM TERMINATOR2!
I shit you not, this was a real thing! Which,I got for Christmass , 1-2 years later because of "peer pressure".
I could not play with my friends on my computer, all that could be done at that stage, was either watch them play, or, they watching me play. Not productive at all if you want to maintain a friendship...
Fast forward a couple of years, and here we are to the great year where Windows XP was all the hype, Windows 98 was still the dream, and most of us were still running Windows 95 on our home PC/HC with the outstanding performance of 100 MHz with 4 MB of RAM, and ~300 Megabytes of storage and playing games from floppy drives that required you to know some DOS in order to run them.
But here arrives an alternative to our -not yet coined- potato PCs...
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you!
The killers of good grades!
The takers of lunch money!
Destroyers of good attendance,
Teachers of smoking and true smack talk!
The notorious,
The infamous...
INTERNET CAFES!
(No coffee or Internet available)
I say this because, the early ones, only had LAN, and when I say that, I mean actual LOCAL Area Network, you could play ONLY with others that were at computers in the same room.
But boy was that fun, I remember saving up lunch money, and ditching school to go play Quake2 with a couple of my class mates, and going ham against on "The Edge".
I still remember the console commands for the map, and my "macros"
fov 110
sensitivity 6
bind q "fov 30;sensitivity 2"
bine e "fov 110;sensitivity 6"
Back then, there was no such thing as "Press Space to jump", no son, back then you jumped with "Right-Click" you crouched with "Shift"(or Space, depending on preferences) and switched between weapons with the "Tab" key, you pressed "F1" for the Frag Sheet.
"Well, why not use the scroll wheel for changing weapons?" you might be asking, that is because this were the mice we used.
That's right, no scroll wheel, not even optical sensor, our mice had BALLS! And boy did they SUCK! When optical mice come to (our) market, they were something like luxury item, only certain exclusive placeshad those bad boys.
End of Chapter I
Childhood -> Puberty.
Chapter II
HELL(Adolescent puberty)
(Coming Soon™)