DraconisRosae

I started writing simple programs in 1979 when I was 10 years old on a Franklin 2000, which was an AppleIIe clone, at my elementary school and a Commodore64 at home. I soon tired of the limitations of BASIC programming and moved on to non-symbolic Assembly as high level compilers for these systems did not exist, at least not for the home computer hobbyist. The wonderful part of that was that both computer systems that I had the access to had the same microprocessor, the 6502, so as long as I kept my code very neutral I could use the same library functions on both architectures (They shared microprocessors but other than that their internals where radically different.). The way I chose to load my modules on either system was similar and was referred to as Wedging BASIC though the actual method for doing this varied. Adding hardware components to your computer in those days typically meant writing your own drivers, and having an intimate knowledge of the hardware that you were mating to your system. Fortunately hardware sold in that era came with White Sheets and Manuals that described the hardware to a very fine level of detail to allow people to do just that.

Do to the very low level of programming and software development that I cut my teeth on, in my introduction to computer science, my views of computer programming and software development may be a bit different then a person's views that grew up with wonderful resources like the internet, Open Source Solutions to study from and IT books galore and RAD, Rapid Application Development system, and IDE , Integrated Development Environment, that can allow a developer with little knowledge of the actual systems they are working on to make truly amazing applications, providing they master their tool of choice.

Don't get me wrong I love my RADs/IDEs too, I just can't help but feel sorry for those developers that will never know what a kernel function is or how they would ever go about using one, or even know if they should be using one, or what A9  64 means, and the satisfaction of knowing that you know .

In the 3+ decades since 5th grade I have occupied myself learning everything I could about systems and software. I watched Technology grow from machines that booted on their proprietary ROMs into their own custom version of BASIC with barely any remanence of a real operating system to be found and make shift file systems to Smart Phones that rival the processing power of Main Frames I have worked on and PCs that can boot on many diverse media types into many different OSes or even Virtualise  another OS or system architecture inside of a process of their current OS.

I was once asked by a friend "If you could have any 'Super Power' imaginable, what would it be?" I thought for a moment and replied "To be able to think faster, so I could learn more in whatever time I have left on this ball of mud.". As learning is the biggest passion I have, and nothing fills that void quite as completely as tearing into a computer and getting it to do what I tell it to do, I just wish from time to time that what I wanted it to do was what I told it to do!