Me, Myself, and Mormonism (Pt. 1)
The super condensified version:
I used to be Mormon.
Big Love is a TV show about fundamentalist Mormons who practice polygamy.
My previous boss prided himself on being an ass (in a generally fun way), and called me Big Love because of said past.
The climactic version
There were tons of books in the box. Dusty, cracked, old. They smelled great, and of course my hands shot out and grabbed each one, thumbing through each of their pages as if I could actually understand them.
I saw math books, some other unmemorable books, even a scuba book.
All of them seemed really interesting to me, simply because I knew they contained knowledge I didn’t have. My Dad must’ve been a genious, I was sure of it, ha.
And then I saw it. A box, deeper than the thickness of the average books, containing a video, a single 3 1/4” floppy, and a few 5 1/4” floppies. The front
of the box showed some charting things and chess pieces, but on the back of the big box it showed a rendition of “Super Breakout”, and underneath it read
“Learn Programming Today with Turbo Pascal!”. I didn’t know what programming was, but I knew that it meant it would somehow let me play a new game on my computer.
I raced down the attic ladder and ran into the office.
This was right around 1998, when computers like the one pictured here
were totally awesome. Mine was just like that, sans the 3 1/4” drive. I’d just started learning how to get around in DOS, and we even tried out Windows 3.1,
so I knew exactly what to do with this. Unfortunately, I don’t remember any of the commands I typed, or I’d share for a good laugh. But needless to say,
I somehow got myself into the IDE that was Turbo Pascal.
It’s amazing looking back. Without any instruction, I discovered how to run a sample program. I seriously did not have any idea what this was, but I knew that it was doing something. All I wanted was super breakout! So I kept at it, and saw a string in the program’s source code. “Hello world!” it read. I changed it to read: “Hello Keith!”, and ran it again. And there it was, in all it’s glory.
I could feel my brain explode with possibility. I’d done it… I’d created something my very own, without help from a ‘grownup’, without help from a program. I’d bent this awesome machine to my will, and made it do exactly what I wanted it to. I realized I need to know more. I figured out what Write(“String”) did well enough, but what were these other words? uses, var, and begin/end?
Sadly, I didn’t have the book until months later. The video didn’t help. All it said to do was read the book. Finally, we found it at my Uncle’s house, but even more sadly was the fact that I couldn’t figure out what the book was even saying. My young mind had great difficulty in grasping anything the book was trying to tell me. It would be a couple years before I figured any of that out.
But I stuck with it. AOL was just beginning to come around, and we begged our parents for a new computer that we could get online with. Finally we did, and I used a search engine
for the first time to find other people who were into the same things as I was. I created a website using HomeStead, but was disappointed with how little I could do with it. I
wanted to make the pages DO things. And then I found out what PHP was, and started poking into scripts. My hacking was just that though… copy/paste with little understanding.
And then I remembered Pascal. Oh Pascal, my first true love. The book unfolded before me now. I had enough bits and pieces to make heads or tails of it, and thus I created my first program: Using the frequencies listed in the back of the book for notes, and deciding that a whole note would last one second, I created a jukebox that played the star spangled banner on the internal speaker of my oldskool computer, since my Dad wouldn’t let me use Pascal on the new one.
“You can really mess things up if you’re not careful, Son”, he wisely said. Story of my life :D
