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Comment from E-mail
When I hit your website today, I noticed in the “letter of the day” someone had already sent practically the exact email that I would have sent. You are probably being deluged with email after Pirates and after appearing on Slashdot today, but for the record:
1. my first computer experience: Black Bell & Howell Apple ][ in grade school (started learning Basic – I had full access, as the teachers were mostly fascinated to watch someone else play around with it).
2. Learned BASIC on a Bally/Astrocade game console with Bally Basic cartridge
3. Finally got an Apple / / e in Jr. High
4. Got my first 300 baud Hayes modem at 14. Got my own phoneline shortly thereafter (thanks to my parents, who really just wanted their phone back).
5. Started my first BBS at 14
6. Got a “Woz” Apple IIgs
7. Still ran BBS but it was down most of the time as I did a ton of graphics/audio/assembly programming on the GS for sheer fun
8. Got a degree in CS from University of Illinois
9. Started a game company with another guy, released 15 titles in 6 years
10. Left that to follow other dreams – working on smaller, possibly less competitive software projects now. Doing games for Palm Pilot. They’re fun to write 🙂 and hopefully fun to play. I have a few fans, anyway 🙂
Woz
So many of us just fell in love with computers for no explainable reason.
It seems that lots of cool young computer people went through the BBS phase in those days.
Congratulations. So many don’t bother to finish college. At least you can tell others that you did.
One game that I hope to see again in a PDA is one that I had on my Magic Link. An array of characters was presented and you had a fixed amount of time to swoop out connected letters that formed words, with longer words counting more. The key to a good score was to look for batches of common word endings and suffixes and to work on that.