Binary Memories – Part I
My first contact with computers happened in the 90s, between games, BBSes, IRC, noisy modems and a lot of curiosity. That's how my fascination with machines, the internet and programming was born, long before I understood where all of it would take me.
My first contact with computers was around 1993/94, playing Duke Nukem at a cousin's house in Cruzeiro. And, man, it was great. It fascinated me. And I'm not talking about the game, no, but about the machine, the system, the possibilities.
Even though my child's eyes were still blind to all those possibilities, I saw possibilities all the same. Like "drawing on the computer", listening to music or simply hearing the machine start up.
The mechanical noise of Windows booting was amazing. Everything fitting together, connecting and, at the end, on the black terminal screen, you just typed:
WIN
That was it. Windows could start.
And the unlimited games? Now I am talking about games. It was Minesweeper and a card game I never learned to play. But it was great.
My first contact with the internet was around 1995, sitting next to my uncle Dirceu, the oldest nerd I know, who today is resting in paradise, on God's fiber optics.
He was on what he called a BBS and, on another PC, he was on IRC. I don't remember which BBS it was, but the IRC network, if I'm not mistaken, was EFNet.
And the ASCII art screens and everything else were hypnotizing. I loved it. It was beautiful. And I wanted to see more.
In 1996, I got my first PC, with all its absolute power and a fearless USRobotics modem. My AIM connection was amazing at my 9 kbps. Amazingly set up by my friend Dionísio, who also put me, for the first time, on ICQ and on my IRC.
And get this: I had a nick.
The nick was your identity, it was how we were known in the virtual world. Mine was Wagon, as in a train car. I had seen it on a sticker on a notebook. I didn't know what it meant but, when Dionísio asked me what nick I wanted, it was the first thing I saw in front of me.
Two days to download one song. And that's if you were lucky and tried after midnight, on holidays.
So I wanted to know more.
After a lot of fighting with my mom, I bought a Delphi book at Avalon, an old bookstore in my town. And, in theory, I, as a kid, shouldn't have understood any of it.
But I learned.
I made my first software in Delphi, and it did the coolest thing there was for a kid: it was a little button that, when you clicked it, changed the whole program's color.
Didactic. A very didactic book.
To be continued.