The good old days !!

I almost gave up on a piece of really complex dma/interrupt code yesterday. All the failing scenarios were eating up my mind for the whole day and then through the night.
Then it hit me in the morning right after i wonke up. And whola!!! i was back in action. Suddenly there it was my interrupt handler in action doing asynchronously the things i commanded it to do. Hmmm.... where have i felt that warm feeling before????
Well i am so surprised to see myself at the same place i was in 7th grade. Surely its the same warm feeling that i got when i first saw my MS DOS tsr code in aciton. This lead me down to trip in a memory lane.

Ah!! i started with simpel IBM BBC BASIC. Soon we had a 386 at home and i was all set to do my coding mistakes. Created my first sort of blogging/journalling application in QBASIC. Nothing much but it was publishing my daily notes into a root directory. Well i spent more time coding it than using it. My academics will show a steep downwards curve that time which never went up ever again :).

But i was not happy with the interpreter. And i actually didn't know about compilers, (hey i was just in 5th grade). I started digging up the exe codes. Spent months trying to decode them without a 8086 manual (this was teh pre internet era may be 1994-95) i remember i actually managed to run a modified exe. I think i had some dissassembler from sombody i absolutely don't remember. Unfortuantely i had a disk crash (i didn't tell my father but i had tried some crazy stuff with disk IO). Neways by now i was also learning VB and getting frustrated by lack of flexibility.

After two years in windows world i turned towards my first c compiler Turbo C ++. Everything happened at twice the speed since then :-)). Learned how to write TSRs ported my favourite NIBBLES game from basic to C, half done port of GORRILLA.BAS was never completed. Built my own equivalant of NCURSES library.

Then came the internet era, we were one of the first 50 internet users in INDIA. had free internet shell access for about 6 months. Dad had not given me access as it was my Final year at highschool but i cracked the password with my keyboard monitoring tsr anyway and spent most of the time browsing the infant yahoo direcotries and the good old gopher (anybody remember the once popluar protocol?).

By now i was in Junior College and there came the first issue of PCQuest with slackware 1.0 CD.

Rest is the history :-D.

At each step there have been number of occassions where i felt the same warm feeling i got today. I wonder how many other people can relate to their childhood hobbies in their jobs.
I think i am just one of few lucky ones.....