Let's Get Meta

I gotta say I’m really enjoying Hugo and learning my way, very slowly, around Markdown. Emacs certainly helps with composition. And honestly Markdown is really easy overall. I remember back in the day when I was first learning to code webpages, and writing HTML by hand, with a whole lot of trial and error. I found a nice Markdown guide if you’re interested in learning. Seriously, I just skimmed through it right now and it was a great little crash course. A friend on Mastodon gave me another guide that I need to check out soon too.

Composing entries this way just feels friendlier. Everything is just plaintext, no special tools required, no WYSIWYG overlays and abstractions needed. It’s high-level but at the same time, kinda low-level. Mid-level? I mean, seriously, I can just open this in Emacs, Emacs is kind enough to do syntax highlighting (and a bit of text preview), and no real fuss. I use Markor on my tablet to compose Markdown, which helps a bit with WYSIWYG and preview, but is still lightweight and straightforward.

Although it’s not quite as “quick” as just hitting “post” in WordPress vel sim., generation of the site and uploading is super straightforward. I know I’ve talked about my travails with finding a workflow on the tablet (and to some extent on the laptop as well), but once that’s locked in, it’s been smooth sailing. And it makes writing feel fun and worthwhile again, valde operae pretium. Somehow it’s simpler, calmer. I can see how things will look, formatting is very fluid, and bonus, I can enjoy the mouselessness of editing in Emacs. Nothing against mice, but I’m trying to get more familiar with keyboard shortcuts (though I will say I still keep a slice of the “desktop” in Emacs with a shortcuts cheat-sheet open, haha). It is just really relaxing, I don’t know how else to explain it. Just a warm fuzzy feeling, if you can get that from computery stuff.

It’s Friday night and calm. I’m listening to music and relaxed. Feeling a little nostalgic and even geekier.

I’ve probably talked to some of you about my first computer. My parents got it for us in 1993. My dad shopped for deals in the Computer Shopper (remember that? massive mail-order catalogues, hundreds of pages) for months before he found us a good deal. Here are the specs as I remember them:

• 33MHz 486DX processor
• 120Mb HDD
• 4Mb RAM
• 2400 baud modem
• DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.11
• 1X CD-ROM drive
• Trident 256 color SVGA videocard (though we could never get the driver to install, so 16 colors it remained)

I don’t know why those specs have stuck in my head for almost 30 years now, but I remember them clear as day. We had various other computers over the years (Pentiums and whatever else), but the first one always stuck with me. I used the hell out of that computer. For internet, we started out with AOL (like most people), and used the DOS client. I remember that was when they charged by the hour, and my parents were really unhappy about me running up a huge phone bill being online all the time. I was 9 years old, what did they expect? I remember reading the DOS 5.0 manual cover to cover (no joke), and teaching myself to program batch scripts. I got to be a veritable wizard at .bat files!

I played around with BASIC a lot too. QBASIC shipped with DOS 5.0, and naturally, it included a couple of “games”: NIBBLES.BAS and GORILLA.BAS. I played the hell out of those, but of course I wanted to design my own eventually. I remember learning a lot from reading others’ code. There was a weird, rudimentary version of Microsoft Money called MONEY.BAS too. Here’s an archive of some of those old games/apps, if you ever want to revisit them. Eventually I was able to get my hands on a QuickBASIC compiler that would let me compile .exe files so I wouldn’t need the goofy QBASIC interpreter! Later I played around with Visual Basic in Windows (what a change!).

I could talk at great length about my first forays into gaming, DOS and Windows, but I don’t want to bore you (too much)! I started this thinking about my first experiences with the internet, so I’d like to circle back to that. The DOS client for AOL was pretty cool, and I spent a lot of time playing (badly) Neverwinter Nights, one of the first MMORPGs that I know of. Eventually we tired of using AOL, and bounced between CompuServe and something else (can’t remember offhand). We eventually got DSL from a local company in my hometown called ContiNet, and it was a whopping 40Kb up/down (SDSL, yeah!). Before that we had 28.8kbps and 56kbps modems; the original one, as I mention above, was 2400 baud (yikes).

Not sure how I found out about this, but when I was in middle school, I found out about a local ISP called EFN (Eugene FreeNet). They offered free dialup access and free shell accounts. What the hell is a shell account, I wondered? All I knew is that I could dial in, get a connection, then use something called Telnet to log in using my username and password. That was my first taste of UNIX. Just a beautiful command-line, all plaintext. Even though I was familiar with Windows at that point, I still spent quite a bit of time in DOS, so I was very familiar with the command line. I quickly learned ls and rm and all of that fun stuff, and started using pico and pine and such. It was confusing and a weird new world, but at the same time, I began to get comfortable with it. I found out that they offered webspace, too, and I could have my own tilde ~ directory and serve my own website! All I had to do was put it in the public_html directory off of my homedir.

So I started coding a webpage and voila, my first website, such as it was, was live sometime in 1996. Dear gods, I tried to find it on Internet Archive and there are actually some snapshots of it from about 1998. Wow. Blast from the past! I initially coded it by hand in pico, but eventually I started using tools like Dreamweaver and other WYSIWYG HTML editors. I was a really big Netscape fan back then, but (yikes) I really loved Internet Explorer too. And looking back at the Wayback results, I’ve been using the nickname Greyor since at least 2000, if not earlier than that. Wild. It went through a lot of iterations, and I never did a whole lot with it, but I learned a lot while on EFN. I taught myself rudiments of Perl/CGI scripting, basics of the UNIX shell, and HTML, as I mentioned.

I worked on a lot of webpages over the years, some on EFN, and some on Geocities (I imagine that one is on the Wayback Machine somewhere too, wow…), and elsewhere. None were quite as friendly and extensible as my webpage on the EFN webspace though, and I even did some volunteering at EFN to learn more about computers, and got to know some of the sysadmins there.

I spent a lot of time playing around with computers back then. I originally wanted to be a computer programmer for my career. I started taking CIS classes in summer 2000 while I was working on finishing high school, and started college as a CIS major in fall 2001. That fell by the wayside, but I still adore computers and obviously do a lot with them. They are still a large part of my life, but it’s for fun now (and in the course of my work).

I don’t know what inspired me to write all of this, but I wanted to share it with you all, friends. If you have any computer memories you’d like to share, or if any of this resonated with you, let me know! Cheers.