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nice times
In the first perid, from 92 to 94 my grand mother made me a gift: a second hand 8088 computer. There was no graphic capabilities on it. There was no hard disk on it either, so I saved all my pojects in 5 1/4 floppy disks (360 kb each). I spend most of my first moths just playing a text mode tetris and doing animations with IBM's Writting Assistance usign ASCII charecters and pagedown'ing my text document fast enought. Later I discovered GW-BASIC interpreter, but had no idea of what it was. However, a nice teacher of mine (Montxo) had an own informatic shop, and he gave me an obsolete book about GW-BASIC that was really usefull for me, though. I didn't understand a word of it during the first weeks, and even a year later there where some parts that were to complex. There was no programing explanation, just the list of keywords of basic with small examples. However, I learned many things those months - actually I made several text mode games. During the second period (94-96) I bought a second hand 386 with 256 grayscale video! I didn't wait to much to play around graphics. While my friend where Doom-ing, I made some games and my first "serius" applications. One of them was a replication of the well known "Paint Brush" program avaliable on the beta version of Window 95 that I saw on one of my friend's home (hi Daniel!), but mine was runing on DOS of course. In 97, using the same computer, I made my last game in Windows 3.1 this time, using VBasic. It was the Monopoly game; almost complete; actually I remember to play sometimes with my sisters. However, I discovered the fractals at that time, and I didn't develop anything else but fractals during one year. I close this period with my first C program, made during my second moth of university: it was the classical Pong game, done in Turbo C with VGA graphics. Some weeks later I discovered the demoscene, and ... well, that's another istory. still nice times Since 1998 until 2002 I just played with fractals and demoscene. Well, It might sound like I did not too much... however that's the time where I discovered that I don't like programming, but computer graphics and mathematics. I learned everything I know: sound synthesis, realtime grapchis, raytracing, digital image processing, information theory, procedural content creation, physics simulation... What I know now is just a deeper understanding of the techniques I learned and the concepts I absorbed. I must say that beeing in university helped a lot to learn so much: I had lot of spare time. Well, may be learning the therory behind Fourier Transforms or synthetising radiation patterns using Bessel functions helped. But it was mainly the time I had to play, read, test and create what helped. Still no responsabilities... and reality becones paradise for some years. Not only I developed my artistic sense of graphics and music, but I also discovered the papers of Siggraph, and the old research papers of Devaney about dynamic systems. And of course, I enjoyed the demoscene's parties, I met Javier Barrallo, and well. I learnt so much that I could not wait to the university to finish to enter the world of research and investigation (those words where quite unknown in the university world). |