My Life in Computers - The Andrew Hunt Story
Posted on Sat, Jul 25, 2009 @ 05:40 AM
While I do not want to make this sound like a PBS special, it maybe could become a viral hit on YouTube. Today my parent's celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. We had planned this big surprise get together. Had the family flying in from all around and even had some prime food arranged. But with the bad weather that has all changed.
So I am sitting here "goggle-ing" what to do since our original plans where all outdoors. As I start to search it has me thinking about how technology has changed over the past 40 years. Now only being here for the last 32 years does limit my overall scope (My project management training forces me to use words like scope). But none the less, I am reminded of my first computer. It was a Toshiba T100 and the wonderful "Word Star" and then later "WordPerfect 4.2", the standard before Microsoft started its world domination. While many of my friends had Commodore 64's I was using this Toshiba. Man did it suck, it had no video games, nothing, and it was nothing more than an electric typewriter. I can remember that for fun I would go to the DOS prompt and hit dir *.* just for the fun of seeing the directory come up (lame I know, but hey at 7 years old in the 80's that was cool).
But then my life was saved. Along came Nintendo and my formative years where now productive (Not), well maybe but that could be a subject for future blog post. I can still remember playing Final Fantasy with my cousin Myles. One of us would work the map and the spell books and the other did the controller. We spent hours on this game, I think we even dream about it. It was so bad that as we were heading to hockey we would strategize about what to try next. Zelda, Donkey Kong, Contra, Metal Gear, Metroid and Mario, the six best friends a young boy who lived in the middle of nowhere (also known as rural Ontario) could have.
Then came the high school years. While playing hockey and trying to keep up my "jock" image, I had to keep my inner "computer geek" on the inside. In grade 9, while my friends are taking "Intro to Typing" and planning there NHL careers (some actually made it)I am in grade 11 computers and the wonderful world of Turbo Pascal and C+. I can say that I am not old enough to have worked in FORTRAN; I will leave that distinction to my father's generation. But even at that I was a little different. While all the other kids in my class where developing video games, one guy created a game better than Zelda, all in Turbo Pascal (that takes talent), I was developing an animal genetics program (rural Ontario kid coming out again). At the end of the semester, my teacher comes to me and says, "Looks great, do's it work?" I tell him yes and get a 95 grade (pretty good for a grade 11 in OAC computers). It never did actually work, just a bunch of great looking code and an early form of a GUI interface. Nevertheless, hey it looked great and I marketed the heck out of it (kind of reminds me of some other products on the market).
Then came the WWW and life has never been the same. From university where teachers did not even now what WWW stood for, man that made essays and papers easier, to now where I sit here, tweeting some friends, researching some info for a white paper, all while wireless connected to the world, looking out at Toronto and can barely see the CN tower for all the rain.
As my 2-year-old son cries out for a bottle, I wonder what advances he will see, when my wife and I celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary (if she can stand me that long)? Will he look at .net, SharePoint and SQL as we do FORTRAN? Will he look at Halo, Warcraft, and the Wii the way we look at Pacman? Man the wonderful things to come.