Jevan
[ free music, drawings, writing and more ]

Other - Personal History

When I was age 11.5 to 15.5 I was in high school (yr7-10) which was 1984-1987. At home I spent a lot of time programming on the apple ][c with ProDOS. I created an assembler language compiler (in basic) by implementing features of the best compilers I could find in magazines and some additional features as well. It generated machine code (runnable files).

Also I made a japanese software by using HROUT which was a machine language routine designed to map characters on the keyboard onto graphical bit maps, when you printed a character (eg A) then the corresponding bitmap would appear on the graphical display, normally it was used for computer games (eg pacman characters etc) but I used it to put in two japanese alphabets (hiragana and katakana) and then it could convert romaji (such as neko which means cat) into japanese characters. Also it could quiz you on japanese words (enter the japanese or english translation for a word).

Also I made a computer game by putting in a maze from a maze creator, and using various bitmaps as the still images of 'monsters' or enemies that were encountered as you move through the map (by typing go north, go south, go west, go east, or something like that).

It is a pity that these efforts weren't sold to a magazine such as 'compute' where other people could have benefited from them and copied my source code. I feel that a lot of my effort as a child was wasted (though I did improve my computer programming skills). I feel that I was at some of the forefront of programming back in the mid 1980s and it was easily possible to be so from home because programming wasn't so advanced back then. Actually I also had TML Pascal for the Apple ][GS in 1988 which was an object oriented language, but, I didn't really understand how to program graphics because there was no web yet hence no examples I could find to teach me.

In approx 1993 I wrote a bulletin board software (BBS) and Rob Lada hosted my BBS for a few months at his dads place in queanbeyan. My parents didn't want me hosting it myself using their computer/ phone line, partly because they were worried about me giving away their address to people using the bbs, which is why I hosted it on Rob's dads computer. Unfortunately after a few months they no longer had the phone line available so it had to be shut down. I probably should have moved out of home and hosted it myself. The BBS software included message email forum, files download/upload, some usenet as messages (mirror of rec.humor), online game compatibility. This was what people often used their modems for (to access a BBS) before the web browser was invented. The software was unique in that it could be fully administered remotely, the remote (via modem) screens were the same as on the local computer. Unfortunately I was sick of the bulletin board software by then so I wasn't prepared to take it any further. At the time I was thinking of implementing a client software that would enable pull down menus when accessing my bbs, as well as backward compatibility for the normal terminal client (ANSI) such as telix. Nowdays we have that capability anyway in our web browsers via javascript. I probably should have uploaded my BBS software to other BBSs so that other people could copy the source code. I gave it to Harry Konstantinou who was setting up a BBS system at the time, but, he ran into some problems and I wasn't prepared to support it, so he abandoned it.

I did some of the biggest projects I thought up myself to do, in my younger years of life. It's a pity that there weren't any employers willing to use my programming skills. I'm still quite good at programming but I do feel I've been largely under-utilized. In 1990-1992 I did a bachelor of science major in computer science, in 2007 I did a certificate II in IT at the Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE) (2D Game Programming using Torque Game Builder). I completed some recent study with a Graduate Diploma in Information Technology at UC (2008-2010), and in 2011 semester 2 I started a Master of Information Technology at UC. We will see what happens next.