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T-File_9_____February_15_2005
Traveling Through Time on a Budget
By Emoticon
"Young drummers should learn the history of the instrument. You have to
know where you came from in order to know where you're going." -Louie
Bellson
I was born in 1987, and as of this writing, I am seventeen. I
began programming at age 11 when my sister got a TI-83+ graphing
calculator which I quickly commandeered, and shortly thereafter moved on
to computers. I started reading hacker "text-files" about a year later,
and like most clueless newbies, read a lot of material that was between
15 and 30 years old, in blissful ignorance. Time passed and I wised up
a bit. I realized I wouldn't be connecting to dial up boards with a 300
baud modem or blue boxing in this lifetime.
A year ago, I found myself reflecting on my "hacking career". I
had learned the intimate details of programming languages, processor
architectures, and operating systems alike, I had been published in an
internationally distributed magazine, I had learned more than I ever
thought there was to learn, yet I still felt entirely overwhelmed by how
much I knew nothing about - which is paradoxically what makes me a
hacker in the first place. I came to the realization that the ranks
which I had at one point so wanted to climb through were nonexistent. I
was glad to be so enlightened, yet I couldn't deny that something was
certainly missing.
Though an opiate in it's own right, hacking never offered the
same feeling I got from reading those old text files, and I longed
greatly for the times I thought I had missed. So I went on eBay and
bought myself a time machine.
I purchased a 1 Mhz 6502 based time machine with two 5.25 inch
floppy disk drives, a dozen software-packed disks, a set of "Adam and
Eve" game paddles, a green monochrome screen, and a stack of manuals.
This time machine had the ability to transport me back to 1983 with the
flip of a glowing red switch.
As soon as I hooked everything up, I flipped the switch and was
immediately launched twenty years into the past. It was a strange time
in which Metallica was worth listening to and George Lucas had not yet
discovered the joy of bastardizing classic films with "digital
re-mastery" and uninspired sequels. This was precisely the world I had
read about so endearingly.
Well, I played around with the machine for a while, running
through on-disk walkthroughs and the pile of manuals. I learned to
program the computer with Applesoft BASIC; despite the Pascal and
Fortran books, the only programming language that came with the system
was the in-ROM Applesoft BASIC interpreter. Unlike TI-BASIC, or Visual
BASIC, this BASIC felt powerful. Applesoft BASIC could do cool things,
like peek and poke memory addresses directly to grab hardware
information or sound the built in speaker.
Spending an entire summer learning all there was to know about
this computer, I became a rather proficient Apple IIe programmer. I
wrote a minimalist war dialer, a Pong clone, and a handful of other
games. I even learned to write machine language programs.
Now the machine is busted. I don't know exactly when it
happened, but now, it only goes forward through time.
While my experience with time travel has taught me a lot about
technology, I like to think I've come away with a bit more than straight
factual knowledge. It gave me a chance to learn a lot about my history
and myself. As I learned more about each, I learned there was less of a
difference than I could previously fathom.