Читать книгу Execution Plan - Patrick Thompson - Страница 11

If you’re old enough to remember a time when there were no video games, then you’ll know that the first time you saw Pong it was a vision into a new place. Cyberspace is the place you look into when you look into a monitor, past the screen and into the game world. In there – out there – everything is possible. You can control events there.

In the real world, events control you.

I used to be a student. You don’t need to be a student to get into software. Most early coders – the ones on the frontier, the ones on the cutting edge – taught themselves. They had to. There were no landmarks. Now, you need qualifications and experience. I learned how to code from a ZX Spectrum, trying to write games that would make me a millionaire like Matthew Smith. You’d see pictures of him in computer magazines, this long-haired seventeen-year-old said to have a million-plus bank account. This was in the early eighties, when a million was big money. The computer magazines of the time used to have long listings of programs, endless pages of hopeless code for you to type in at the keyboard of your computer. They always contained typos. If you typed them in correctly, they failed to run. You had to interpret and debug the code. You’d spend days typing this stuff in, saving it to a C90 cassette every now and then. Saving took minutes in those days. You had to watch the tape run and listen to a high-pitched electronic squealing.

Sometimes, even now, I hear that sound as I fall asleep.

I corrected the code in magazines and got programs to run. I got jerky stick-men to stroll across the screen. I got fifty bad versions of Space Invaders to run. I got bad eyesight and pale skin.

I gave up on programming games. With games the cutting edge is always somewhere else. In computing the cutting edge is in all directions, and you can’t keep up with it. You have to find a wave and ride it. You have to pick a direction and head that way.

I learned computing by myself, and then couldn’t get a job. The first wave had gone. The second wave was coming up behind me, schools full of kids learning to program. I didn’t have a wave to go with, so I got stuck in the trough. I needed more experience. I had some money in my bank account, left to me thanks to helpful deaths on remote branches of the family tree. I invested it in myself and took a degree course at Borth College. That’s where I learned about other worlds. That’s where I learned that they’re bad places. And then, like all students, I forgot everything I’d learned.