Growing Up Geek (A Hanselmeme)

Scott Hanselman posted up a picture of himself as a young Hanseldork and then tagged myself and others in hope that we'd perform the same kind of self-humiliation.

That's what Scott looked like ---->

I'd like to think that I wasn't so geeky as all that. Kids that looked like Hanselman? I used to beat them up and steal their code.

Perhaps, now that i think of it, i was a little bit nerdy.

Is it nerdy for an 8 year old kid to spend lunchtime playing chess against the librarian? Is it nerdy to read and write elvish runes?

Perhaps my big brother Jeb had a touch of the nerd. He taught me binary, boolean logic, and he taught me to program in Basic on the beloved Amstrad CPC 6128.

I asked him the other day whether the CPC6128 booted straight into Basic, or there was an intermediate OS. Here was his response:

The programming commands available right from ON comprised "Amstrad BASIC".
The disk-related commands such as SAVE, CAT etc comprised "AMSDOS".
 
We had to put a special disk in and type |CPM [i.e bar + CPM] to get the CPM operating
system.  That's what we used for formatting or disk-to-disk copying.  Some
games ran on CPM so were launched by putting that game's disk in and
executing |CPM.  Most games and programs were executed with RUN
"<nameofgame>"...
 
Ahhhh, takes me back.
 
(In contrast, the Apple IIes at CBC [i.e. at school] always defaulted to booting from
whatever 5.25" floppy was in drive A - with B spare for a data disk.  In
those puppies you had to hold a switch on the back on startup for them to
go into command-line AppleBASIC.)

To fulfill the requirements of this meme, i ought to include a picture of what I looked like as a child. Here it is:

Not too dorky. Of course now that I'm grown up I look far more suave:

Smoking is cool, right?

To spread this viral meme I'd like to tag Justice Gray, JoCo Loco, Joel Pobar, the BronJohn collective and, for his sins against F#, Paul Stovell.

How about you? Grow up dorky? What's your story?

'Barry Kelly' on Sun, 12 Oct 2008 11:38:17 GMT, sez:

I had a CPC 464, the one with the tape drive and only 64K rather than 128K bank-switched memory. This was with the monochrome monitor.

Oh, and the tape drive didn't work, so no games for me (apart from the crappy racing car game on the cartridge), only programming.

And some coffee got spilled on the keyboard, so the M key didn't work either. I had to write a keyboard macro to rebind the 0/Ins key to be M, so that I could write proper programs.

So, I'd write >200-line behemoths (yes! all the way up to 2000 and beyond!) that would take maybe a minute to list on-screen. Projectile programs using basic Newtonian physics. The pros and cons of discrete versus continuous physics for simulation versus problem solving, yes. A little maze-based game engine, driven by extensive DATA commands. Playing with the console windowing system that the Amstrad came with. Some of my first ventures into machine code with peek and poke, working with the Z80's A and X registers, and the meagre handful of opcodes I had translations for (I had no documentation for Z80).

Yes, happy times. I still have the manual in my library.

'Barry Kelly' on Sun, 12 Oct 2008 11:53:26 GMT, sez:

Ah yes, I've just pulled down the manual. The command was "KEY DEF", to redefine a key number to a different ASCII mapping.

It's a good thing KEY DEF doesn't itself require the 'M' key, as otherwise I would have been screwed...

'lb' on Sun, 12 Oct 2008 12:16:18 GMT, sez:

@Barry -- i remember the 464, we visited people who had them. I think you're lucky the tape drive didn't work, because it's a singularly frustrating experience when it *does* work.

KEY DEF sounds vaguely familiar, but we never got down machine code as kids. That stuff seemed like voodoo science and i didn't even think about it until i went to uni.

'Farmer Jeb' on Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:33:07 GMT, sez:

Where's LB's geeky childhood photo that Hanselman challenged him to produce? Actually, he was a well-groomed pretty-boy as a kid. Even his 80s Kmart clothes would probably hold up pretty well on review today. His big bro (me) is a different story. I was dorky looking...
My link shows me brandishing my academic awards in Grade 8 (1987). The "prev" photo I'm posing on my yellow BMX with orthodontic headgear circa 1985.

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