Code. Never Stop.
A programmer’s inside story
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For me, coding comes with a pure joy of creation that, although I’ll try, can’t be put into words.
Contagion
Almost two decades later, I can still remember the first piece of code I’ve written and made me feel like a mini-God. By that time I had “the microbe of computers”, as family and friends called it.
I already had it for a couple of years from one of my cousins, Oliver. The contagion happened during one of my childhood summer holidays.
I spent the summer holidays at my grandparents, in the Romanian countryside. At that time, student summer holidays were 3 months long. They always ended in a blink of an eye.
My cousin brought his computers with him to his parents’ house. He had two of them: a black one and a white one.
The black one was an older HC model, which I can’t recall, though it was a computer that needed audio cassettes for loading programs onto it. He told me that he was recording programs broadcasted from TV in dedicated TV programs.
Imagine, for a second, people starting their tape recorders in front of a TV that is emitting weird sounds. The same kind of sounds you’d get if you’d answer a phone when someone faxes something. I guess some of us will never experience that too.
The white one, HC 2000 was the star of the show. It was a computer from the HC series. This was a series of Sinclair ZX Spectrum clones produced in Romania from 1985 to 1994. It had an MMN80 CPU, an impressive memory of 64Kib RAM and it also had a floppy disk!
My cousin was generous enough to let me, and a couple of others, play games on his HC 2000. Dizzy was my favorite game.
He was amazed that I, a 9-year-old, could name and identify the transistor terminals. This was something that his faculty colleagues had difficulties in doing.
I could have played forever!
