I started programming sometime before I was ten, on a Fortune computer which could only display a green on black text-based display. It was my Dad who taught me. Back then it was all about line numbers and editing lines manually by retyping each line with the corrections you wanted, and typing LIST to see the whole code. Hilariously primitive, though one day many years later I stumbled across an old BBC Micro which magically I found myself able to program, so, you know, it's all experience. Also there are a bundle of jokes about BASIC which I'm now in a position to laugh at.

Some time after that I moved up to high school and also incidentally got a now-ancient Pentium 75 with Windows 95 installed on it. A friend of mine pointed out that QBASIC could be found on the Win95 installation CD (along with that incredibly boring game, Hover!, which sucked up a lot of my time). I spent a good amount of time learning to use that - it was complicated and I was teaching myself and the help file was less than easy on someone as old as I was at the time, but I fuddled along.

I don't remember when exactly I gave up programming in QBASIC, but I do remember why. I was starting to do wireframe renders in 3D, rotating ones no less, true 3D. It was all very exciting. You'll find some of those programs below. Anyway, I'd started trying to draw flat shaded polygonal sides and it wasn't working. QBASIC lacks the functionality to draw that kind of stuff and even if it could it'd do it at a snail's pace. I was handed a book which purported to help me but it was called "Fast Algorithms for 3D Graphics" and was based mainly in C or possibly C++: it was nightmarishly incomprehensible to understand. I'd hit my limit at that point and lost all enthusiasm. I think it was about that time that I started to get into Perfect Dark, actually...