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CV before CV [2/3]
Oct. 1st, 2013 11:00 amIn the previous post I've described how I was programming before I had an access to a PC. Of course, PC did not replace Speccy instantly, at least for me. I could use Speccy almost 24x7 (sometimes I skipped school if I wanted to), and my exposure to PC was very limited in the beginning.
In 1991, I had a chance to play the "Prince of Persia" on IBM-XT for 20 minutes :) In 1992 I seen a video clip from Dune 2 in Moscow "Mir knigi" shop. That was fascinating! Also my school got a class of twelve IBM PS/2, connected on a NetWare network. Of course, in 1991 when they were brand new only high school students had the access, and I was a lot younger. But I quickly managed to get a chance to use them after I had demonstrated that I know the basics of Pascal.
So the following few years (until high school) had been a Pascal era for me. Switching to Pascal from Speccy BASIC/asm was a huge change. Lesson learned: strong/static typing rules!. For a messy person like myself, this is a true bless!
However I did not develop anything but rather I was solving programming olympiads puzzles during that time at school. Then my father bought a 80286 computer with 1MB of RAM and I could use it for about 1-2 hours per day. Not too fancy but with 270MB hard drive we had plenty of space. So I installed Turbo C and had learned the language.
Few years passed, I had been winning 2nd and 3rd places at the regional programming Olympics, but I never went to the national contest (there was funding only for a guy who won the 1st place)
It became more interesting during my last 3 years at the school (1996-1998). I learned C++, Forth, PL/1(but did not like it), installed Linux on our new AMD K5/8MB, got to semi-finals in a city wide Warcraft 2 tournament, and became a Fidonet node (2:5066/44). I was earning some money helping in fixing PCs, but PC upgrades were still far beyond my budget so I spent everything on programming books and CDs with pirated software.
During that time I developed a lot of code and built some confidence and understanding of project sizes I can handle on my own. I developed three major projects: a handwriting recognition app (in C, second place at a national contest), an app solving simple school physics problems (2nd place at a regional contest) and then a simple logical inference system (in Java, and it crashed when I was demoing it at a national contest'1998).
This post became too long so I'll write about Uni, internet and hacking in the next one.
In 1991, I had a chance to play the "Prince of Persia" on IBM-XT for 20 minutes :) In 1992 I seen a video clip from Dune 2 in Moscow "Mir knigi" shop. That was fascinating! Also my school got a class of twelve IBM PS/2, connected on a NetWare network. Of course, in 1991 when they were brand new only high school students had the access, and I was a lot younger. But I quickly managed to get a chance to use them after I had demonstrated that I know the basics of Pascal.
So the following few years (until high school) had been a Pascal era for me. Switching to Pascal from Speccy BASIC/asm was a huge change. Lesson learned: strong/static typing rules!. For a messy person like myself, this is a true bless!
However I did not develop anything but rather I was solving programming olympiads puzzles during that time at school. Then my father bought a 80286 computer with 1MB of RAM and I could use it for about 1-2 hours per day. Not too fancy but with 270MB hard drive we had plenty of space. So I installed Turbo C and had learned the language.
Few years passed, I had been winning 2nd and 3rd places at the regional programming Olympics, but I never went to the national contest (there was funding only for a guy who won the 1st place)
It became more interesting during my last 3 years at the school (1996-1998). I learned C++, Forth, PL/1(but did not like it), installed Linux on our new AMD K5/8MB, got to semi-finals in a city wide Warcraft 2 tournament, and became a Fidonet node (2:5066/44). I was earning some money helping in fixing PCs, but PC upgrades were still far beyond my budget so I spent everything on programming books and CDs with pirated software.
During that time I developed a lot of code and built some confidence and understanding of project sizes I can handle on my own. I developed three major projects: a handwriting recognition app (in C, second place at a national contest), an app solving simple school physics problems (2nd place at a regional contest) and then a simple logical inference system (in Java, and it crashed when I was demoing it at a national contest'1998).
This post became too long so I'll write about Uni, internet and hacking in the next one.
