My Technology Journey - Part One

Jan 23

Jan 23 My Technology Journey - Part One

The old adage is true in software engineering. You will always be learning. Can seem daunting to those starting off on the profession. This is is the first part of two or three parts documenting my journey with technology. Part One will be from a toddler the first time I could reach the keyboard until the start of my Georgia Tech days. I was pretty fortunate that I had access to a home computer and later computers with the internet for almost all my life.

CeeDee Backslash

Some of my first memories with a computer was interacting with MS-DOS. My favorite game was Reader Rabbit which I played on my family’s 286 computer, running up to 12mhz with the turbo button! To play the game I had to memorize “CeeDee Backslash” aka “cd\” to change directory and execute Reader Rabbit. I was a happy camper. I must have been three or four years old during this phase. One invention totally blew my mind was around the corner.

Nomes Live in the Computer?

One item that totally blew my mind was my first interactions with the internet. We had Prodigy Internet at our house in the late 1980’s. Would log onto Prodigy and somehow the computer would know the weather. The computer would say it’s sunny outside and I would open the curtain and see sun. Some how the computer was all knowing! Was there a meteorologist living inside the computer? They are too big this has to be nomes. Would not be until a few years would figure out this was thanks to the internet which was coming of age.

Elementary School

Was pretty fortunate that we had a pair of computers and phone lines at my house in the early to late 1990’s. This time in my life, we switched from Prodigy to America Online. The learning curve was a lot easier with America Online. Browsing the AOL Keywords thinking this was the internet. During elementary school, when Windows 95 was released I really wanted to work for Microsoft and work on building Operating Systems. I had no idea how they were put together but anything that ran Space Cadet Pinball and Microsoft Flight Simulator 95 were amazing to me. Turning towards middle school , time to start telling the computer what to do.

Middle School

In middle school we had some swank computers at home during the Windows 98 days. In Middle School I was in the computer club. I got to have one elective period going around and servicing the Macs in the school. I pretty much became pro at restarting the Macs and cleaning out stuck balls in teacher’s mouses. Towards the end of middle school, the computer club was starting to teach Basic which seemed so daunting. My only experience with formulas was DOS Commands and Excel adding numbers together. I was not to being outside a GUI for too long. To be frank I was not good at Basic. This hurt, for the first time I was not good at the computer. How on earth will I work at Microsoft? Similarly around the same time we got our first CD Burner. Another love of mine was music and enjoyed making mix CDs of my favorite tracks. The CD-Rs being blue because of the dye was super cool to me as blue is my favorite color. The internet was becoming a place to share music and in 1999 we got high speed DSL to our home. High school was coming up and I would continue to learn and grow.

High School Academic Timeline

I want to give a very special heart felt shout out to the late Ronald Smith. He was my favorite teacher of all time and I had classes with him all four years of high school. Mr. Smith passed away in 2008 and I owe a lot of my love of technology to him. I truly miss him and wish I could get coffee with him today to thank him for all of his patience.

I was very fortunate to go where I went to school at the turn of the millennium because we were the only school in the county at the time [today there are three STEM magnet schools] having four years of computer science. I filled most electives with computing related electives.

In 9th grade was my first formal classes in telling the computer what to do. I took web design which thought me HTML and finally a year long class in Visual Basic my 9th grade thought by Mr. Smith. Unlike Basic in my failed middle school attempt, there was a GUI portion to Visual Basic and I felt I was actually building an application. We made funky applications that would flash colors across the screens and open and close the CD-Rom drives and place them as startup tasks in the computers in our lab. Was not difficult getting around the desktop protection software.

In 10th grade I got exposed to the language that would change my life the most, JAVA. Now in honors computer science, JAVA was the language of choice. Object oriented programming was difficult for me when I was first exposed. I don’t feel like I got the concepts until years later. I missed the visual portion of Visual Basic. We ere compiling items and just looking at textual output. Also in 10th grade I took a semester of advanced applications which included Microsoft Access and Adobe PhotoShop.

In 11th grade was limiting myself to just one CompSci class at the time. My first AP class was in 11th grade, was APCompSci A. This class was thought in C++. Comparing my experience with NetBeans X2 for JAVA vs Borland C++ Builder, was much more a fan of JAVA. Also with JAVA I could learn easier sometimes at home and can use a text editor and JAVAC to run my programs at home. I was not good at build concepts like CMake. The Verbosity of JAVA error messages was way easier for me to debug and icing on the cake to get me hooked in the JVM.

In 12th grade of my senior year, one last year in high school! Ready to take on the real world! The final year of high school, was in APCompSci AB which was a return to JAVA. The school decided to introduce AB since the exam changed from C++ to JAVA. I was allowed to take AB for those who were in A the year before. Was awesome, another year of Mr Smith and some close friends and back to JAVA. The picture on the post is me in APCompSci AB! Around this time started dabbling a little PHP, mainly Coppermine to organize all of my pictures on my and my father’s company website.

High School Professional Timeline

In high school, I formed with my father a home business called Rolac. In 1999, we bought www.rolac.com from AT&T and later in high school to a friend, Apis Networks who literally built a hosting platform as a service for other hosts. We let Rolac fade the wind when I graduated university, I still wish we still had the domain.

Going back to my love of CD-Rs, I started making digital content to be distributed via disc; CD-R and DVD-R. Started with taking paper copies of product brochures and turning those into PDFs so multiple brochures can be sent on a CD. This turned into converting VHS videos into MPEG and placing along side. This matured into making menus and auto-run capabilities using a program called Multimedia Builder. All of the scripting was VBA related so that Visual Basic class came in handy in 9th grade.

Around 11th grade I made the switch to the big digital experience, Macromedia Director. Shockwave was becoming the language of interaction on distributed and online media. Was a pretty successful home business. I would charge $25-30/hr for mastering work e.g no artwork but building the Lingo. We would offer free “conversion” for videos. Our main profit center was the burning of the discs. We made margin on every disc that we would burn and ship. if you visited our basement in the early to mid 2000’s you would think we were the biggest pirates in ATL with the burning towers and disc printing devices.

Because of the income I was able to afford some premium items for a high schooler. I had a cellular phone from Sprint since 2001. My sister lived in another city at the time of long distance and Sprint allowed me to call her for free. Also looming around this time was my Sprint PCS phone had mobile internet. Though the internet would burn airtime, I would be able to browse small WAP versions of web pages from my phone! Like looking up movie times and weather. The nomes were back, not on my phone!

We were eventually doomed by the rise in residential high speed internet. We did ok converting VHS and MiniDV movies to DVD but the number of copies died off.

Though we had the website until I graduated Georgia Tech which was hosted on Apis Networks. I got to dabble in PHP and use the website as a test pad for some of my web ideas. Learning some Unix Skills and PHP was not bad.