My view on technology

My father spent many years as a Teacher in the Universidad Regiomontana (also see this ) and he made an arrangement with computer lab to let me go and “practice” with the computers they had a t that time. I spent many hours, when the lab was free, programming in basic and playing in those computers. A game I remember is Karateka ; at that time I was at High School and was taking some Karate classes of ShitoKai and that game took my attention. At high school we had classes of BASIC , I previously used BASIC for my First big program, so this course was not quite exceptional for me, but I took some practice with the programs I created.

First Shareware application I recall was DOOM . As a shareware application it only came with a couple of free chapters and if you want to continue playing you must buy the full game. Shareware concept, from my point of view, revolutionize the software industry, from now on, applications came in a shareware mode, where some features will unlock until you buy the full application or if you don’t pay it, some functionality will be discontinued form the installed application.

I was reading this post: Resize a UIImage the right way where is mentioned the copy and paste programming . I agree this is a big problem when downloading code from the web without testing, but, copy and paste make things easier when developing similar functionality. The existence of code libraries makes us copy and paste code snippets to reproduce functionality. Programs in the big picture are different, but in its internal functionality are similar. Database access is “barely” the same and don’t make sense to rewrite all the database access code, it is easier (and practical) to copy that code from a library or other sample we previously create. At the bottom line, I really like the article and support copy and paste programming when doing the right way.

When I start college, back in late 80, I start using more often the PC. In Mexico there were little penetration form PC for an average citizen; most computers were in Companies or Universities. As I decided to study a computer science engineering, part of the homework we were to do requires to be created using a PC. When I start, the common storage was 5 1/4 inches Diskettes , the available storage was 360KB. Initially those were single sided, but with a notch on one edge you could turn the diskette in the reader to make if double sided, we can naw stored 720KB. Later, diskette reader evolved to read both sides without flipping the floppy disk. Some common thing was to store all your stuff in the same diskette: The Operative System ( MS-DOS at that time). Word Processor, a common software was ChiWriter I also remember having Professional Write at the same time. Personal Files, sometimes you could have all homework from the year Most of the computer had no hard drive and, consequ...

Around 1990 my uncle Ibrahim and my aunt Enriqueta, gave me a great gift, a computer. I don’t remember the brand but it was a Commodore 64 equivalent, not really sure if it was a TRS-80 . The Computer had Floppy Disk and also came with a Tape Recorder, and a couple of games in cassettes. Unfortunately the connection cable for the Tape Recorder was absent, but that was no problem for someone with initiative. After some experiments, and accidentally deletion of a couple of games, I made my own connectivity cable. The advantage of having the cable was that I was able to read and also save information in cassettes. At that time I was already a fan of Robotech , so I start a personal project to create a Robotech Game. For the computer, the development language was BASIC . The Idea was simple, as with the series, the SDF1 will appears somewhere in the orbits of the outer planets and will need to return to earth. That was a good project because I needed to make a lot of research. F...

When I was a kid, around 1978, my father had the greatest job in the world: he was in charge of the Data Center of Vidriera Monterrey , well, we now call it Data Center, I don’t remember how they called back then, I suppose they call it the same. Making some memory, I think the Job at Data Centers has been always too demanding. That’s why he didn’t like telephones at home, as it can be used to bring work to home (also at that time it was not so popular in México), for this reason, Vidriera often sent the company’s driver to pick him up when problems arise at work. My father was a well known person in Vidriera, I remember going with him to the work, especially on weekends, and everybody greet him. We couldn’t walk more than a few steps without waving someone. I remember many times when I got to the Data Center with those big rooms and big computers, tape readers and huge printers. The punched cards were strange sheets of paper and those my father gave us (to my sister and I myself) k...