It was about 1998 to 2000, somewhere there. I was 14ish, and I got 6, 486dx 33MHz machines by literally pulling them out of the trash after my high school threw them away.
I connected two of them with serial cables and spent about 6 months in DOS with Djgpp compiler and dos IDE, I used a chess library and coded in C, and I finally got the two machines to play chess against each other, client / server architecture using a serial protocol I invented - state was held on the server but transmitted to the client and the client made the decision and sent state to server. Pretty inefficient but I was very young and self taught.
The feeling of pure joy when i finally got them working and I watched the moves scrolling down the screen.
1998 - made IE4 pop calc.exe using some weird scripting bug that I didn't fully understand. I promptly forgot about it because "lol M$ is crap" and I didn't understand the significance. Maybe back then that wasn't special or significant.
Pirating "gamez" and warez on IRC, back when it was cool to have coloured text announcements spamming the channel from a hundred dcc bots, and listening to the chip tunes included on all the MYTH and CLASS cracktros.
2001 - discovering regular expressions in "Dreamweaver Bible" which led me to Jeffrey Friedl's "Mastering Regular Expressions" which in turn led me to "Programming Perl" and other O'Reilly Perl books before building my first back-end with CGI.pm and MySQL.
80s: Mario, 90s: Wolfenstein and Final Fantasy, 00s: WoW, 10s: Minecraft. (I'm a game programmer, so it's relevant to my career. I mark every era by which games are most inspiring.)
I began programming in 1968. 50 years later I can't think of anything I'm nostalgic about. There were some OK to Good times, but nothing stands out. I'd rather have done something else. I do recall first reading Tog's edition of Macintosh User Interface Guidelines as opening up my perspective. For lack of anything else I'd choose it.
I'm curious to hear about your 50 year career spanning some of the most important revolutions in computer history. What do you work on now, and how does it compare to what you worked on it 1968? How did people such as yourself get into computing in 1968? What was the availability of computers and what rules dictated human participation with computers? What improvement was the biggest leap forward? Where there any 'winters' you felt where innovation became dormant, stagnated or even declined?
At the time I started, you couldn't get a degree in software engineering. "Software Engineering" wasn't even a thing. I took a course in programming for geologists just before I flunked out of Stanford. Later, I took an evening course in Pascal. Even later I took Stanford's online course in iOS programming. Whenever some new concept came out, the hardware/systems vendors had to prime the pump by educating everyone with manuals. Every new thing was so obviously superior, one eagerly sought books, magazine articles, or manuals to get on board. We all hauled ourselves up by our boot straps. It was an exciting time.
Back then computers filled huge rooms, and time was allocated by the second. "Nobody" knew how to program then, so it was easy to get a job programming for a contractor at NASA-Ames and later for the U.S.G.S.
The first thing I ever did was a FORTRAN IV program that contoured simulated lunar regolith data. These maps were crude line-printer maps with each character representing a depth.
The last major thing I did before I left the U.S.G.S. was an interactive color geologic map integrated with an ore-deposit database. That was about 1989. Since I left the U.S.G.S. in 1995, I've done website programming and "side projects." I'm currently working on a word processor for professionals engaged in a major writing project, one involving lots of source documents and notes. Like most side projects, the biggest problem is marketing.
I suppose everyone else would point to PCs as the greatest innovation. I disagree. For me it was the hugely powerful APIs Apple provided with the Mac. Before, you had to create nearly everything from scratch. It was revolutionary. As an application-programmer, the Mac's APIs were hugely empowering. I could now do things it would have taken a team a year or more to do.
I realize C is very popular and I mean no offense, but I hate it. It's prominence grates on my nerves. It's lack of discipline appeals to the worst emotionally immature tendencies among very young programmers and can lead to life-long bad habits. That is the perspective of an scientific-application programmer. I'm sure the world seems very different for folks focused on systems etc where C has advantages.
This has been rather long, but there were lots of questions to address. Thanks for the opportunity.
Contrary to popular belief, hind-sight is even more muddled and confused than the present : ) I really wanted to be an archeologist, but I thought it was too impractical. In general I was too "practical" in my life choices. I wish I had at least tried vagabonding at bit combined with writing, looking for something - adventure or I don't know what. That, however, it probably naive. Real world choices were much more difficult and uncertain and my memory is inadequate.
2002: Devised without a book what I later discovered was the MinMax algorithm (my father was quite unhappy when he discovered tic-tac-toe game trees penciled on the side of the staircase) and wrote a really terrible chess engine with it. That sparked a lifelong interest in programming. A couple years later, I had a blast implementing AlphaBeta (w/pruning), NegaScout, MTDf. Eventually got into NNs, which I used for leaf-node scoring, and made a bot that played on ICC (Internet Chess Club) that became a recurring opponent for an IM at the time. The IM would chat with the bot, since he was convinced by its play-style that it was human. In college, turned the leaf-node NN into an FPGA to speed up the calculations by parallelizing them.
Then I got a 9-5 job and my dreams of working in AI faded into the ether. Life comes at you fast.
Do you still have any of this stuff sitting around? Particularly the FPGA part.
If you do, I would love to see videos of this in action (not code). Would be absolutely awesome. Seriously! I don't care that it's from 2002, that's what makes me more interested if anything.
Also... people are Very Interested™ in neural networking now. I am 100.0% sure that if you threw this info at a few companies they wouldn't mind waiting a little while for you to shift gears (switch jobs) and catch up to the way things are done now (train, at expense, for a few months). You'd likely take a bit less time than the next person, in any case.
Yes, this would certainly be a major undertaking and not something to be rushed, but I don't think your interviewers would be disinterestedly waiting for whoever they're seeing next, to put it one way...
One thing. I'd recommend a position where you step back and look at the bigger picture rather than drown in implementational/technical details all day - you're clearly already figuring things out for yourself, so bogging yourself down with the ways others are doing everything would be noise you could do without.
The only thing I can find is one of the original versions of the chess engine. It's still running on a free web-host: http://blitzter.atspace.com/. Pardon the writing style of 16-year old me.
Unfortunately, I can't find any of the newer versions of the engine or the FPGA code. I wrote most of the newer versions in college, eight to ten years ago; the hard-drive for my desktop may be around my house somewhere, but it will take some time to find, setup, and search. You've piqued nostalgic interest, so I may just do that...
I'm currently running a small software agency in the Boston area that employs a couple developers. One of our larger clients integrates their AI-based product with larger customers' platforms, and my company does quite a few of the implementations. That has given me enough of a taste for now; hopefully we can pivot completely into that space one day. For now, I'm enjoying working at an arm's reach.
Wow, I think I was in the middle of finding PHP really hard when I was 16... :)
I'm falling over a bit at how the high-bit-finding system actually works (in http://blitzter.atspace.com/documents/game/index.html), along with the rest of the page to be honest. I'd say this is 90% my brain not being great at this sort of thing, and 10% me not knowing chess (shh). I'm very impressed though.
It's great that you're able to keep AI on the radar in a reasonable capacity, even if it's not front and center at the moment. Hopefully the pivot you mention does happen one day, and works out really well. :)
I won't lie: all of this was incredibly difficult and time consuming to learn. Homeschooling was a double edged sword. On one hand, I had five to six extra hours per day for activities like this; on the other hand, I had no teacher, so I relied on Barnes and Noble and rare internet access. It took many years to reach even a basic level of competence. Sixteen year old me also found most things quite difficult :).
That said, the page definitely lacks the rigor necessary to communicate the concepts used in the chess engine -- another downside of my education. My parents emphasized engineering related subjects over everything else, which held back the development of my writing while accelerating subjects like math. You can see that pretty clearly in the descriptions on the site. Regardless, the terminology is correct, so it's easy to find a more clear explanation by searching for it elsewhere. Perhaps it's better to think of the descriptions as a poorly written glossary.
Talking about this brings me back to a time where I wrote software because it satisfied a burning passion, and not because it paid the bills. I still enjoy it, but with less intensity. Maybe that will return if I can get into AI again.
Thank you for the kind words! I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.
1995 ish - I build a milling machine controller using a BBC Computer, some stepping motors (requiring an 8 bit port to control, 4 bits each, 2 motors) a unit I researched and ordered and some machine code.
* In Ukraine sometime in the 90s we had no computer, but the local arcade did. Sometimes my parents would give us "kapeyki" (basically like pennies) and my sister and I would gather then up and then run to the arcade across the street to stand in line to play The Lion King. We were obsessed with both the Disney film and the game. As soon as you died you lost your spot and the wait back in line could be an hour sometimes. I kept dying on the giraffes.
* Later we had a short-lived computer course at School Number 11. We had to come in outside of normal school days (which were Mon-Sat) to participate. I was too young to remember the specifics, but we had to type in programs to play some car racing game. I was really fast at it and always got to play the finished product first - unfortunately the course was short lived.
* When we got our first computer after moving to Alabama and got AOL dial-up I realized "Holy crap you can make things." My mom thought it was a passing phase, but she dutifully went the library with me to check out stacks of books on HTML, CSS, and PHP and brought back video game CDs she spotted at her trips to random stores. One of those games was Creatures 3 and it was what got me interested in life simulations to this day.
* Later I got to work with one of the guys who helped make The Lion King
My early teens around when I first got a copy of GNU/Linux. Someone in a local IRC channel sold me a CD with Slackware 6 for a couple of bucks. That launched me into an intensive period of learning.
In these youthful days, when I didn't have to earn a living and school ended at 3 PM, learning stuff about hacking computers was pure in some sense, maybe because it was purely self-directed out of curiosity.
I was in the Systems Lab at UTSA in 1979 when a professor came in with a tape and said that he got it from Bell Labs with a thing called Unix. We had studied about Multics and the word play wasn't quite obvious to me them. In any case, we did not have a PDP-11 to read it on; the lab had a Data General Nova. My attention was devoted to my project and I did not have time to waste on frivolous things like the newfangled OS from Bell Labs.
90's - I was coding a Turbo Pascal assignment in my brand new Pentium 66Mhz. Previous computer was an 286 @12.5Mhz. You could really feel the difference in speed compiling... and debugging.
I remember not beign able to spot a bug because the machine was so fast.
Inside a loop I mistyped extra zero in the counter: Instead of 1000 iterations it did 10000.
After those 9000 extra iterations the program output was wrong and I didn't knew why.
In the Pentium you couldn't tell the difference in speed because the output came instantly... but in the i286 the difference in speed was so big you could tell you iterated too much.
90's - I went to the computer room in college and found a friend copying stuff to a lot of floppy discs.
Turns out he was downloading linux for the fist time...
I grabbed another computer and help him download copy the stuff.
We could not download the floppies in parallel because the university had a shared 64kbps connection to the Internet.
4 hours and 100 floppy discs later he when home and installed Linux for the first time and opened my first linux account outside the university lab.
It started in the 80s when a friend brought me into a department store to type quickly into a computer "10 PRINT 'HELLO'; 20 GOTO 10" and then he pressed return. Magic! I was hooked from that moment on forward.
using 20+ floppies to install windows 95 only to get up "windows protection error", like a zillion time, and trying again in hopes it ll work the next time?
90's Scraping every penny I could get to buy a NeXT box so I could download the WorldWideWeb browser and editor so I could check out this new thing Tim Lee had created called the web. Got the money, got a NeXT box, built a page and decided that I wanted to get out of the desktop app development business that day. After the CGI spec I knew I was going to be able to.
A good follow up to this conversation would be what are your biggest technical disappointments by decade:
80's would have been LISP machines not catching on.
90's downfall of Commodore, Apple's handling of Copeland and the purchase of CosmoWorld's by Computer Associates (that might have been early 00's).
80’s: Coleco Adam. Cassette tapes, Buck Rogers, and programming for the first time in BASIC. It died when I was about 10 years old.
90’s: 486, 28.8 modem which I spent a small fortune on (for a teenager). Programming in C++ and Assembly. Getting a CD-ROM drive for Xmas and installing it. Getting a book on Linux and installing Slackware from the included CD. Finished high school and within a year I began my now 22+ year career as a programmer and it has taken me around the world.
Winter Games, on a 486, when I somehow managed to edit the high-scores with a hex editor and put my name on top. I started programming the next day and haven't stopped since.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 88.1 ms ] threadI connected two of them with serial cables and spent about 6 months in DOS with Djgpp compiler and dos IDE, I used a chess library and coded in C, and I finally got the two machines to play chess against each other, client / server architecture using a serial protocol I invented - state was held on the server but transmitted to the client and the client made the decision and sent state to server. Pretty inefficient but I was very young and self taught.
The feeling of pure joy when i finally got them working and I watched the moves scrolling down the screen.
I was hooked on programming
Back then computers filled huge rooms, and time was allocated by the second. "Nobody" knew how to program then, so it was easy to get a job programming for a contractor at NASA-Ames and later for the U.S.G.S.
The first thing I ever did was a FORTRAN IV program that contoured simulated lunar regolith data. These maps were crude line-printer maps with each character representing a depth.
The last major thing I did before I left the U.S.G.S. was an interactive color geologic map integrated with an ore-deposit database. That was about 1989. Since I left the U.S.G.S. in 1995, I've done website programming and "side projects." I'm currently working on a word processor for professionals engaged in a major writing project, one involving lots of source documents and notes. Like most side projects, the biggest problem is marketing.
I suppose everyone else would point to PCs as the greatest innovation. I disagree. For me it was the hugely powerful APIs Apple provided with the Mac. Before, you had to create nearly everything from scratch. It was revolutionary. As an application-programmer, the Mac's APIs were hugely empowering. I could now do things it would have taken a team a year or more to do.
I realize C is very popular and I mean no offense, but I hate it. It's prominence grates on my nerves. It's lack of discipline appeals to the worst emotionally immature tendencies among very young programmers and can lead to life-long bad habits. That is the perspective of an scientific-application programmer. I'm sure the world seems very different for folks focused on systems etc where C has advantages.
This has been rather long, but there were lots of questions to address. Thanks for the opportunity.
The DEC-20 is under heavy load, all the DECscope VT52's are occupied, as well as the less desirable DECwriter III terminals with fan-fold paper.
Many of the DECscopes are running TECO EMACS sessions, I see some people writing papers in Scribe (Brian Reid's word processing language.)
Suddenly everything stops in the room and everyone holds their breath for a couple very long seconds.
"%DECSYSTEM-20 NOT RUNNING" prints on every terminal in unison. Everybody cries out in anguish.
Good times.
Then I got a 9-5 job and my dreams of working in AI faded into the ether. Life comes at you fast.
If you do, I would love to see videos of this in action (not code). Would be absolutely awesome. Seriously! I don't care that it's from 2002, that's what makes me more interested if anything.
Also... people are Very Interested™ in neural networking now. I am 100.0% sure that if you threw this info at a few companies they wouldn't mind waiting a little while for you to shift gears (switch jobs) and catch up to the way things are done now (train, at expense, for a few months). You'd likely take a bit less time than the next person, in any case.
Yes, this would certainly be a major undertaking and not something to be rushed, but I don't think your interviewers would be disinterestedly waiting for whoever they're seeing next, to put it one way...
One thing. I'd recommend a position where you step back and look at the bigger picture rather than drown in implementational/technical details all day - you're clearly already figuring things out for yourself, so bogging yourself down with the ways others are doing everything would be noise you could do without.
Unfortunately, I can't find any of the newer versions of the engine or the FPGA code. I wrote most of the newer versions in college, eight to ten years ago; the hard-drive for my desktop may be around my house somewhere, but it will take some time to find, setup, and search. You've piqued nostalgic interest, so I may just do that...
I'm currently running a small software agency in the Boston area that employs a couple developers. One of our larger clients integrates their AI-based product with larger customers' platforms, and my company does quite a few of the implementations. That has given me enough of a taste for now; hopefully we can pivot completely into that space one day. For now, I'm enjoying working at an arm's reach.
I'm falling over a bit at how the high-bit-finding system actually works (in http://blitzter.atspace.com/documents/game/index.html), along with the rest of the page to be honest. I'd say this is 90% my brain not being great at this sort of thing, and 10% me not knowing chess (shh). I'm very impressed though.
It's great that you're able to keep AI on the radar in a reasonable capacity, even if it's not front and center at the moment. Hopefully the pivot you mention does happen one day, and works out really well. :)
That said, the page definitely lacks the rigor necessary to communicate the concepts used in the chess engine -- another downside of my education. My parents emphasized engineering related subjects over everything else, which held back the development of my writing while accelerating subjects like math. You can see that pretty clearly in the descriptions on the site. Regardless, the terminology is correct, so it's easy to find a more clear explanation by searching for it elsewhere. Perhaps it's better to think of the descriptions as a poorly written glossary.
Talking about this brings me back to a time where I wrote software because it satisfied a burning passion, and not because it paid the bills. I still enjoy it, but with less intensity. Maybe that will return if I can get into AI again.
Thank you for the kind words! I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.
* In Ukraine sometime in the 90s we had no computer, but the local arcade did. Sometimes my parents would give us "kapeyki" (basically like pennies) and my sister and I would gather then up and then run to the arcade across the street to stand in line to play The Lion King. We were obsessed with both the Disney film and the game. As soon as you died you lost your spot and the wait back in line could be an hour sometimes. I kept dying on the giraffes.
* Later we had a short-lived computer course at School Number 11. We had to come in outside of normal school days (which were Mon-Sat) to participate. I was too young to remember the specifics, but we had to type in programs to play some car racing game. I was really fast at it and always got to play the finished product first - unfortunately the course was short lived.
* When we got our first computer after moving to Alabama and got AOL dial-up I realized "Holy crap you can make things." My mom thought it was a passing phase, but she dutifully went the library with me to check out stacks of books on HTML, CSS, and PHP and brought back video game CDs she spotted at her trips to random stores. One of those games was Creatures 3 and it was what got me interested in life simulations to this day.
* Later I got to work with one of the guys who helped make The Lion King
In these youthful days, when I didn't have to earn a living and school ended at 3 PM, learning stuff about hacking computers was pure in some sense, maybe because it was purely self-directed out of curiosity.
90s: getting my first Sparcstation on my desk
I remember not beign able to spot a bug because the machine was so fast. Inside a loop I mistyped extra zero in the counter: Instead of 1000 iterations it did 10000.
After those 9000 extra iterations the program output was wrong and I didn't knew why.
In the Pentium you couldn't tell the difference in speed because the output came instantly... but in the i286 the difference in speed was so big you could tell you iterated too much.
Turns out he was downloading linux for the fist time...
I grabbed another computer and help him download copy the stuff. We could not download the floppies in parallel because the university had a shared 64kbps connection to the Internet.
4 hours and 100 floppy discs later he when home and installed Linux for the first time and opened my first linux account outside the university lab.
90's Scraping every penny I could get to buy a NeXT box so I could download the WorldWideWeb browser and editor so I could check out this new thing Tim Lee had created called the web. Got the money, got a NeXT box, built a page and decided that I wanted to get out of the desktop app development business that day. After the CGI spec I knew I was going to be able to.
A good follow up to this conversation would be what are your biggest technical disappointments by decade:
80's would have been LISP machines not catching on.
90's downfall of Commodore, Apple's handling of Copeland and the purchase of CosmoWorld's by Computer Associates (that might have been early 00's).
90’s: 486, 28.8 modem which I spent a small fortune on (for a teenager). Programming in C++ and Assembly. Getting a CD-ROM drive for Xmas and installing it. Getting a book on Linux and installing Slackware from the included CD. Finished high school and within a year I began my now 22+ year career as a programmer and it has taken me around the world.