Soon after tearing that code apart, I found myself intensely working through Denthor and NeHe's tuts, and some time later, I now enjoy writing software for a living.
Life sure would have been different had I not explored those disks.
Can anyone relate?
Sadly, I then graduated into a horrible recession so the math degree was useless and i became a librarian. However, in the basement they had these mysterious computers they called roadrunners* and I learned UNIX. which led to my entire career.
*They were weird. Looked like tower PCs but ran some variant of SunOS on i386. I never saw them again.
I was a working-class girl and there was a lot of emphasis on picking a stable career as the one in my family most likely to 'succeed' (because that stability would let me help my family). Since I started college after the dot-com bust, computers were 'risky'.
The Fostex Four track tape recorder was my discovery. My brother and I wore it out. Mom got us a software DAW shortly after.
Fast forward several years, brother ends up at The Village recording studio in LA, works directly with Steven Stills. Not as cool, but I performed for an opener for Head East around the same time. Good times.
So as a kid, I played at things like 'building' a solar cell out of glue, wire, and can lids, or trying to make a nuclear reactor out of strangely colored rocks. When I was ten, I thought that if you would spin a magnet in space you could make a perpetual motion generator. After all, I knew that things in space would spin forever if nothing touched them, and a generator was basically just a magnet spinning near wires. Eventually I met some engineers who explained to me about things like electrical resistance and inductive back-voltage (Thank you Sam and Ernie). In my early teens, I kept trying to find ways to get around the things that would prevent a perpetual motion machine, and each new idea would teach me a new thing about physics.
By my later teens, I had learned enough physics to give up on perpetual motion, but I was still interested in energy. I got into fusion, and spent a lot of my senior year of high school coming up with bad fusion reactor designs. I learned a lot of new physics that way too. At Georgia Tech I met a kindred spirit (Thank you Nick), and together we started a fusion startup.
I don't know if I never would have been interested in energy if not for seeing that magazine, because energy issues have been everywhere during my lifetime. But I remember that magazine is where it started for me.
I called the numbers and heard weird noises. I was beyond intrigued and had to understand this new world.
8 months saving for a Commodore 64, 6 months saving for a 300 baud modem and I was hooked!
It taught me that money isn't really that hard to get, you just have to repeatedly care slightly more than the next person.
"BASIC is an interpreted language that allows users to create their own applications."
Twelve year old me: "CREATE. THEIR. OWN. APPLICATIONS."
I think it is way harder to be hooked to programming nowadays, the basics are way too boring.
Cue the start of my obsession with digital preservation.
After that, I realized education contained highly arbitrary, personality driven decisions and completely lost interest in working hard for school ever again.
The discovery that grading systems, in general, are not "fair" in that they don't seem to actually adhere to logical criteria ended my interest in school. I concluded that what was being graded was actually your likability to teachers. Being unlikable, that was a losing game for me :) So I mentally checked out.