sutton050

Harping back to my prior post about learning to program, when I spoke at my old Uni, I spoke to a lovely trio of ladies, whom wanted to be programmer/computer folks... And one thing struck me, was how narrow their knowledge was. When they asked me how I got into programming and I explained that when I learned to program in the 1990's there was no github, indeed there was no internet, you could not just go and download a program or join an open source project.  If you wanted tool, and had no BBS dial up to find someone with something like it, you wrote your own. I wrote code to record kills in games on the Atari ST, I wrote text editors for the ST and DOS (EGA graphics FTW), I write 2D painting programs for DOS.... I distinctly remember my college tutor seeing my using DOS interrupt 11 to control the mouse and his saying "you're the first person I've seen work that out"... I didn't work it out by trial and error though, I worked it out by reading, about the DOS...

It has been said by far bigger and better minds than myself, that if you sit still, if you don't continue to learn about new things and innovate you will stagnate.  This has been a huge problem looming within the business I work, certain things have worked since the industry sector was conceived and even though more than half a century has passed it has largely passed the internals of this industry by. That is until very recently, where market competition has sprung up, the market base itself has reduced and so pressure is on... Nowhere is this more apparent in my industry than on the software, the front-line of pushing product to customers. The trouble however seems to be that many people have stagnated, they've stuck with the safe option, the tools which work off of the shelf, I am of course talking about Windows, the entire tool chain that is used by 99% of the company is all Windows based, I am the man on the spot waving the Linux flag. But just a few days ago, the Windows ...

Having a basic knowledge of Commodore Basic v2.0 I took to my A-Levels in 1994 and started to learn Pascal, both "Turbo Pascal" on DOS and "Personal Pascal" on my Atari ST. One of the first things I did, as most kids do is start to write a game, it was a 2D grid style war-game, 28x28 tiles to a map and maps stitched together, it was very roughly based on a table top game I had which itself was a dice & splice of the Guadalcanal Campaign of World War 2... Anyway, I had jungle, and grass, Desert and beaches, water and the tanks, and troop counters moved around, you could air-drop paratroopers into spots when you had earned enough points, and I last worked on it in around 1995 when I started to add Sound Blaster driven 16bit effects into it. But, I also needed tools, I was working on DOS, with no Windows - I didn't get Windows 3.1 until later that year - and at college the compiler only ran in DOS, to stop the compiler and loads Windows, then execute a GUI tool...