Programming

My stepfather Michael. I owe it to him.

He did drafting and design. One day ion the nineteen eighty's at work, someone gave him a TRS-80. He let me use it. It came with the obligatory box of unlabeled disks and several copies of 'digital' magazine. Among the disks was one labelled 'edtasm' in blue pen. It was the editor program for writing in assembly. I bought books on assembly (mail order through a local bookshop) and tried to create the 'pong' game. It was terrible. So much frustration.

When my stepdad saw that, he bought me an Atari 65XE home computer, which had an editor for writing in basic and had a port for saving the data off to a cassette tape so you could reload later. That was a fun time in my life and a good skill to learn early on. It made me unfearful of learning programming, which might have helped me more. I would go on to learn VB, C, C#, Autolisp and VBA.

Today, I'm a refractory designer, and my pet project at home is loading 3D CADD models into Unity where I play it like a video game, manipulatiing them in VR. At the moment it's mostly taking a hammer to it, but when my stress goes back down and I get back to it, it shows real promise.