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I have to start by thanking my mom for getting me into computers. It was back when I was 9 years old and my mother brought home this thing called a PC from work. I guess they were upgrading all of their machines and gave some of the machines away to their senior level staff. This so called PC was the IBM 5150. It ran on a floppy disk drive (a 5.25 size floopy disk) and it was one of the first personal computers that you would find in American homes at the time.
I recall sitting in front of this machine and reading through the instruction manuals on how to boot and install the operating system (which at this point in time I can’t even recall). I would sit for hours and play around with this thing and soon found I could program things in a programming language called BASIC. There was a manual for that too!
One of the first games I programmed was a basketball game. It was very basic. The user would be presented with a few options, such as 1.) Pass 2.) Shoot, 3.) Dribble or if the player was on defense it would be 1.) Steal or 2.) Block. The computer would generate a random number and based on that number it would determine whether your action was successful or not. It also kept score and ended the game at 20 points. The second game I programmed was a game that you had to kill the Greek monster Medusa. She had several heads and you had to guess which one to cut off before she was able to drain you of your health. They were basic and simple games, but hey, I was 9 years old.
This was where my love relationship started with computers and it has had a lifelong effect and gotten me to where I am today.
