Programming - early days

`0:03:05`

who had a Commodore 64. No one else had a computer, so we were all the kids just getting over there and we were all playing "Yie Ar Kung-Fu." I dunno if you've ever seen that game. It was one of the original fighting games. It's really a great game. And I was playing that for the first time at five years old. And we were like seven kids sitting up in this one kid's bedroom, all taking our turn to play the game. And I just found that unbelievably interesting. And I begged and I begged and I begged my dad, could I get a computer? And he finally comes home. He's like, "I got your computer." I was like, yes, my own Commodore 64. And he pulls out this black green and blue keyboard. That's an Amstrad 464. I was like, dad, what's this? — The disappointment. — This is not a Commodore 64. But it was a computer. So I got my first computer at essentially six years old that Amstrad 464. And of course, the first thing I wanted to do,

`0:04:06`

I wanted to play video games. And I think the computer, which he by the way, had traded for TV and a stereo recorder or something like that. Came with like two games. One was this "Frogger" game where you had to escape from underground. It was actually kind of dark. Like this frog, you're trying to get it out from underground. And I was pretty bad at it. And I only had those two games. And then I wanted more games. And one way to get more games when you're a kid who don't have a lot of money, I can't just buy a bunch of games, is to type them in yourself. Back in '84, '85, magazines would literally print source code at the back of their magazines and you could just sit and type it in. So I tried to do that and it would take like two hours to print this game into the Amstrad. And of course I'd make some spelling mistake along the way and something wouldn't work, and the whole thing. I wasn't that good of English. I was born in Denmark. So I was really trying to get into it because I wanted all these games. I didn't have the money to buy 'em.

`0:05:07`

And I tried quite hard for quite a while to get into it, but it just never clicked. And then I discovered the magic of piracy. And after that I kind of basically just took some time off from learning to program because, well, now suddenly I had access to all sorts of games. So that was the first attempt, like around six, seven years old. And what's funny is I remember these fragments. I remember not understanding the purpose of a variable. If there's a thing and you sign something, why would you assign another thing to it? So for some reason, I understand it constants. A constants made sense to me, but variables didn't. Then maybe I'm 11 to 12, I've gotten into the Amiga at this point. The Amiga, by the way, still perhaps my favorite computer of all time. I mean, this is one of those things where you're like, people get older and they're like, "Oh, the music from the '80s amazing." To me, even as someone who loves computers, who loved new computers, the Amiga was this magical machine that was made by the same company