Time for some warm-and-fuzzies! What happy memories do you have from your early days of getting into computers/programming, whenever those early days happened to be?
When I was in middle school, I read an article in Discover Magazine about “artificial life” — computer simulations of biological systems. This sent me off on the path of trying to make a simulation of bugs that ran around and ate each other. My tool of choice was PowerBASIC, which was like QBasic except that it could compile to .EXE files. I decided there would be animals that could move, and plants that could also move. To implement a rule like “when the animal is near the plant, it will chase the plant,” I needed to compute distances between points given their x- and y-coordinates. I knew the Pythagorean theorem, and I realized that the line between the plant and the animal is the hypotenuse of a right triangle. Tada: I had invented the distance formula!
I have really fond memories of using computers before they were connected to the internet. I loved drawing pixel art in microsoft paint, and could get in adhd hyperfocus for hours doing that. I keep this image in my archives in the hope that one day I’ll be able to resist the internet long enough to complete my dream of doing the whole of sydney harbour. But I have memories of doing this image over and over to get a good scale for having enough detail on traffic I planned to add to the bridge, as well as understanding the best ways to approach the oblique perspective in pixels (double pixel corners or single?) also how to get perfect arcs. So much time for such a small image, but all fond memories. Maybe one day I’ll finish the planned larger canvas of the whole sydney harbour
In a way computers transformed from being a thing for making stuff to being just a window to the internet for me, and since that change it has been an endless struggle to use them for making stuff again