__ / \ /____\ .________/][][][\_______. \___________ __________/ ! / /!/ //!\ \! __!_\ ! / /_/ // \\ \ \_____ / __ // /\ \\ \_____ \ / / / // ____ \\ \____\ \ /_/ /_//_/ \_\\_\______\ T-File_9_____February_15_2005 Traveling Through Time on a Budget By Emoticon "Young drummers should learn the history of the instrument. You have to know where you came from in order to know where you're going." -Louie Bellson I was born in 1987, and as of this writing, I am seventeen. I began programming at age 11 when my sister got a TI-83+ graphing calculator which I quickly commandeered, and shortly thereafter moved on to computers. I started reading hacker "text-files" about a year later, and like most clueless newbies, read a lot of material that was between 15 and 30 years old, in blissful ignorance. Time passed and I wised up a bit. I realized I wouldn't be connecting to dial up boards with a 300 baud modem or blue boxing in this lifetime. A year ago, I found myself reflecting on my "hacking career". I had learned the intimate details of programming languages, processor architectures, and operating systems alike, I had been published in an internationally distributed magazine, I had learned more than I ever thought there was to learn, yet I still felt entirely overwhelmed by how much I knew nothing about - which is paradoxically what makes me a hacker in the first place. I came to the realization that the ranks which I had at one point so wanted to climb through were nonexistent. I was glad to be so enlightened, yet I couldn't deny that something was certainly missing. Though an opiate in it's own right, hacking never offered the same feeling I got from reading those old text files, and I longed greatly for the times I thought I had missed. So I went on eBay and bought myself a time machine. I purchased a 1 Mhz 6502 based time machine with two 5.25 inch floppy disk drives, a dozen software-packed disks, a set of "Adam and Eve" game paddles, a green monochrome screen, and a stack of manuals. This time machine had the ability to transport me back to 1983 with the flip of a glowing red switch. As soon as I hooked everything up, I flipped the switch and was immediately launched twenty years into the past. It was a strange time in which Metallica was worth listening to and George Lucas had not yet discovered the joy of bastardizing classic films with "digital re-mastery" and uninspired sequels. This was precisely the world I had read about so endearingly. Well, I played around with the machine for a while, running through on-disk walkthroughs and the pile of manuals. I learned to program the computer with Applesoft BASIC; despite the Pascal and Fortran books, the only programming language that came with the system was the in-ROM Applesoft BASIC interpreter. Unlike TI-BASIC, or Visual BASIC, this BASIC felt powerful. Applesoft BASIC could do cool things, like peek and poke memory addresses directly to grab hardware information or sound the built in speaker. Spending an entire summer learning all there was to know about this computer, I became a rather proficient Apple IIe programmer. I wrote a minimalist war dialer, a Pong clone, and a handful of other games. I even learned to write machine language programs. Now the machine is busted. I don't know exactly when it happened, but now, it only goes forward through time. While my experience with time travel has taught me a lot about technology, I like to think I've come away with a bit more than straight factual knowledge. It gave me a chance to learn a lot about my history and myself. As I learned more about each, I learned there was less of a difference than I could previously fathom.