My Dev Story (2) Discovering My Inner Tweaker

I had always been into computers, from the age of 5, thanks to having a computer enthusiast dad who bought a System V computer with a whopping 68MB disk drive.  I still remember the sound of that drive, a cross between a low pitched grinding and a high pitched shrill.

I loved to explore.  I ran every program in /usr/bin to see what it was.  One I remember very well.  It was a program called profile.hd.  I found out what this program did — it deleted the operating system!  Fancy that!

Needless to say, my Dad was not too impressed as he spent an entire day reinstalling the operating system from 5 1/4″ 120KB or 360KB floppy disks.

But, I learned a lot in those days.  “This is a UNIX system! I know this!”  I learned all of the configuration parameters of two pretty cool programs: vi, and less.  I learned the ins and outs and tweaked those things to my hearts content.  Looking back, it seems like a silly thing to do, but now I’m realizing it has affected my taste in games.

Like many, I like to be able to tweak and customize stuff to fit me.  Later I learned others do too, whether it is selecting weapons for a mech, or choosing the tires or colours on their race car, or choosing a style of base to build, or a path along a research tech tree.

When I was around 9, I used Logo Writer to animate a Coca Cola commercial with the jingle, “Whenever there is fun there’s always Coca Cola.”  Around that time I also tweaked the Q-basic game where monkey throws bananas.  When I was 12, I learned to create C programs, although didn’t do much.  By 16 or so, I was getting into C++.  Now there’s a language with some power!