My introduction to the amazing world of computers came with this article in a Dutch semi-scientific magazine called Kijk (issue June 1982). It contained a brief introduction to BASIC and an example program source for a simple computer game. I was immediately grasped by the possibilities of programming a computer. A few months later, I got my chance to try it out myself on real computers because of a project we had at school (the Sint Laurens College in Rotterdam). Since then, I never stopped writing programs. At first in BASIC, and since I had no computer around, on small pieces of paper.
In those days, you could choose from numerous different brands of computers.
Unfortunately, they were all incompatible with each other. Not an easy choice,
with computers coming and going and prices dropping all the time.
In December 1983, I finally bought my very first computer:
a Sharp MZ-700.
I bought it at the Makro, a well-known wholesale house in Delft.
I must confess that I fell for it mainly on looks,
although the specs were not bad either.
823 guilders was a reasonable price at that time for a computer
with 64kb of memory and a built-in tape recorder.
But those sneaky guys sold the manual separately for 55 guilders!
Looking back, I must admit that a Commodore 64 would have been a more sensible choice. It was no less incompatible (worse still, it was not even compatible with other Commodore machines), but it had three big advantages:
Today, it doesn't matter anyway. I can play with every old computer I like using one of the many emulators around.
In September 1985 I started studying informatics at the Delft University of Technology. Here I learned Pascal, C and a whole lot of other programming languages. Very important to me were the so-called functional programming languages. I got my degree on a compiler for the functional language Haskell in 1991.
I started working as a software engineer in 1992. For a few months I programmed in Clipper (Summer '87 and 5.0), followed by C++ (Borland 3.1) and Foxpro (2.6a, DOS version). When I moved to Exact in 1995, I came to work with good old C again.
Since I started working, it was MS-DOS all the way. Slowly but surely, we are starting to move on to Windows '95. But it still feels like the same old Microsoft crap, only with better looks. I long to the times at the university, where we had some really nice UNIX machines. UNIX is how I like to see an operating system: well-considered and built on a solid basis, not something that is still leaning on a set of system calls that should have hit the garbage can a long time ago. Just imagine: what if Microsoft would have put their efforts of the past decade not into patching up MS-DOS to become this Windows '95 thing, but into improving something sturdy like UNIX?
Well, then probably
Microsoft
would not be the influential company it is today
(and consequently,
Bill Gates
would not be half as rich).
Because of all the competition in the UNIX business,
they would just be one of the many,
struggling to survive amongst all the other UNIX-clones.
So there is a good possibility that there would still be no real market leader
in the personal computer business.
And so we would still have the problem of facing a lot of
almost-but-not-entirely-compatible operating systems,
like we had in the eighties.
But at least users would not have to stare at blue screens and GPFs
every so often when they try to run
two or more 16-bit applications concurrently.
And programmers would not have to wake up screaming at night
because of all the tricks they have to come up with at daytime
just to let a program do what they want, not what the operating system wants.
Wake up! Let's face it,
Windows has become the most important
operating system for home users and small businesses all over the world.
So I grind my teeth and make the best of a bad situation.
In May 1998, I started experimenting with a combination of
Visual Basic
and
DirectX
for some animation I wanted to make.
Visual Basic 5 would have been the perfect tool for this,
if only the screen update would have been a lot faster.
I mean, doing a smooth animation on a Pentium-II 333MHz with an ATI Rage
video card should not be any problem.
But when I made a form with overlapping GIF images
with transparent colors and started moving things around,
the screen flickered to hell and back.
Luckily I found this web site about using
DirectX in Visual Basic.
It takes some effort to get a program going,
but the result is really great.
No more flickering, working full-screen,
easy sound control...
Still, there are some things that bother me.