Programming - early days

`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

`0:06:08`

that produced the Commodore 64. And I got the Amiga 500, I think in '87. — Look at this sexy thing that is a sexy machine right there. — This is from an age by the way, where computing wasn't global in the same sense. The different territories had different computers that were popular. The Amiga was really popular in Europe, but it wasn't very popular at all in the US as far as I understand it. It wasn't popular in Japan. There were just different machines. The Apple II was a big thing in the US. I'd never even heard of Apple in the '80s in Copenhagen. But the Amiga 500 was the machine that brought me to want to try it again. And you know what's funny? The reason I wanted to try it again was I remembered the first time to learn. And then there was this programming language that was literally called EasyAMOS, like the easy version of AMOS. I'm like, if it's EasyAMOS, how hard can it be? I gotta be able to figure this out. And this time I tried harder. I got into conditionals,

`0:07:08`

I got into loops, I got into all these things and I still, I couldn't do it. And on the second attempt, I really got to the point of like, maybe I'm not smart enough, maybe programming is just not for me, maybe it's too much math. Like I like math in this sort of superficial way. I don't like it in the deep way. That's some on my perhaps slightly nerdier friends did who I had tremendous respect for. Like I'm not that person. I'm not the math geek who's gonna figure it all out. So after that attempt with EasyAMOS and failing to even get, I don't even think I completed one even very basic game. I thought the program's just not for me. I'm gonna have to do something else. I still love computers. I still love video games. I actually at that time had already begun making friends with people who knew how to program, who weren't even programming EasyAMOS. They were programming freaking assembler. And I would sit down and just go, how do you, the moves and the memories and the copies, how do you even do this?

`0:08:09`

I don't even understand how you go from this to Amiga demos, for example. That was the big thing with the Amiga. It had this wonderful demo scene in Europe. It's this really interesting period of time in Amiga's history where you had all these programmers spread out mostly all over Europe who would compete on graphic competitions, where you could probably bring one of these different... — On that thing? — On this thing, they would make these little almost like music videos, combining some midi music, combining some cool graphics. And they would do all of it in like 4K, four kilobytes. That is not 4Ks of revolution, four kilobytes of memory. And I just thought that was such a cool scene. This was obviously pre-internet. It was even pre BBS, bulletin board systems to some extent. It was you swap your demo software with someone else by sending them a disk in the mail, like the 3.5s.