Programming - early days

`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?

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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.

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And I was enamored with that whole scene. I was enamored with what they were able to create and I just wanted to be a part of it even though I kind of didn't have any skills to contribute. And that's how I got into running BBSs. I didn't learn programming then and I wouldn't learn programming until much later, until I was almost 20 years old. The bulletin board systems existed in this funny space where they were partly a service to the demo scenes allowing all these demo groups to distribute their amazing demos. And then it was also a place to trade piracy software, pirated software. And I ended up starting one of those when I was 14 years old in my tiny little bedroom in Copenhagen. I had my, at that point, Amiga 4000. I had three telephone lines coming in into my tiny room. — [Lex] Nice. — Which is funny because again, I'm 14 years old. By the time I was in Sterling, my third line, you had to get someone from the telephone company to come do it. I get this guy and he's just looking around like, "What is this?

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Why the hell is a 14-year-old having three phone lines into their tiny little bedroom? What's going on here? Why are all these modems blinking red and black and making funny sounds?" — Did your parents know? — They did and they didn't. They knew I had the phone lines. They knew I had the computer. I don't think they really understood that I was trading pirated software that was both illegal, and whatever else was going on. — Oh, we should probably say that in Europe, maybe you can comment on this in, especially in Eastern Europe, but Europe in general, piracy I think was more acceptable than it was in the United States. I don't know there maybe it's just my upbringing. — Even that conversation wasn't present. I never spoke to anyone growing up in Denmark. — The piracy is wrong. — Had any moral qualms whatsoever about piracy. It was just completely accepted that you're a kid, you won a lot of games. You don't have a lot of money, what do you do? You trade. — Yeah. — Some people would occasionally buy a game. I mean, I once bought a second Master System,