# Journey into the Darkness

## Ch. 1: Awakening

My first experience with computers was in the late '90s when my family bought a Gateway desktop running Windows 98.  I was in elementary school and hardly knew what a computer even was, let alone what it could do.  The internet was still relatively new to the public and we were probably the only household in the neighborhood with a PC and dial-up connection.  Of course I wasn't even aware of the internet, so the only thing that interested me at the time was the large collection of compact-disks for the machine which we kept in a large organizer.  Much of this software went unused, but I would try almost every game in the collection within a year (and there were many).

Some games just wouldn't work for reasons I never did figure out, while others would become a daily activity after school.  We probably had this machine for a couple of years before it was infected with malware and put into storage, where it would remain for more than a decade before I'd take it apart in a misguided attempt to revive it.  If I remember correctly, that old Gateway had something like 32MB RAM and maybe 20GB for storage.

Then around 2003 we got a new HP desktop which I became obsessed with. Like the old machine, this one had a single-core CPU but 192MB of RAM and 30GB on the HDD.  It came with Windows XP and cost only $500 at Wal-Mart (compared to ~$2000 for the Gateway).  Dial-up was still our only connection to the internet and would remain that way even as DSL became more widespread. Every time I connected, the speakers would play a sequence of bizarre sounds that I would come to memorize.  While it probably didn't take more than thirty seconds to complete, it felt longer.

Countless hours were thrown away on the included pinball game in a three-year battle with my stepdad.  He would set a top score, I would replace it by a small margin and he would exceed it by at least five times.  This continued until he reached over 7,000,000 points...  It took more than a year for me to replace that top score.  Soon I would begin exploring the file system, the settings, anything that was accessible.

I wanted to know what could be changed, how things worked, where stuff went. This would later cover disk fragmentation, setting up environmental variables and modifying the registry which was necessary on more than one occasion. Having learned to use a search engine and web browser, I would look up almost any topic of interest and read for hours.  Living in a trailer park meant not having access to the public library, which is just as well.  When we moved into town and I got a library card, I must have paid for at least a dozen books that went missing under my watch.

It was also on this machine that I was first introduced to computer programming and the command line (or what passed for one on Windows XP).  Having read about Java being used to make games, I started there in the hopes that I could write my own 2D side-scrollers.  Apparently the tutorials assumed the reader already understood the concept of object-oriented programming and jumped right into the use of classes for a simple 'hello world' program. I jumped ship and moved on to other languages, wanting nothing to do with this arcane nonsense.  Naturally I tried learning the C programming language since this was apparently what most software at the time was written with, but I never got very far with it.

For some reason I found the syntax of C++ to be more appealing at the time, but the concept of classes still made no logical sense.  Going by the examples given in the tutorials, it seemed like a needlessly confusing way to do the same thing that could be done with procedural programming, hence my preference for the latter which continues to this very day.  Python became my favorite language because it was quick and simple, though I did briefly experiment with Pascal, BASIC, even Visual Basic (a colossal failure and waste of money spent on the book).  Ruby was confusing so I never got past the 'hello world'.

Of course back then I didn't have much of a need to write any software since anything I could think of had already been made, and was far more capable than anything I could have written.  None of the "problems" I needed to solve necessitated custom code.  In the first ten years since my first 'hello world', the only useful tool I ever made was a simple accounting program which kept track of how much money I had and what I'd been spending it on. It was a nice project to use as the basis of learning a new language since it made use of variables, loops, conditional statements, user input and file I/O.  The first version was written in C, then it was rewritten in C++ (though still procedural, so not really C++?), then rewritten again in Python. After that it got lost in a cloud...

There were some good times on that machine, but the journey into alternative operating systems began with an ancient second-hand IBM ThinkPad running Windows 95.  This small but heavy brick never connected to the internet and always needed to be plugged into an outlet to work.  It was already obsolete when we got it and was mostly used for writing short stories or playing with the paint program.  I was especially intrigued by the large box of 1.44MB 3.5-inch floppy disks that came with it, about half of which did not work. Some of them even had useful software to install, including Coral Draw and some other office-related tools.  If not for this antique, the course of history would likely be quite different for me.

One day in 2006, I got the bright ideal to start deleting old files to free up some disk space, despite having literally no reason for this.  After all, I wasn't exactly writing a library of novels, and certainly wasn't writing any software on this thing, not to mention the dozens of floppy disks that could easily fulfill all of my (nonexistent) storage needs.  The first folder to go was the one labeled "WINDOWS".  It was loaded with files that all used the same icon, and any attempt to open them prompted a dialog box to appear, telling me there was no software installed that supported this file type.

Little did I know that this is where the operating system lived, so the mistake of deleting this folder didn't become apparent until someone tripped on the power cable half-way through the purge.  By this time the battery had long since reached its end of life, so the machine powered off at once. It was this one mistake that led to where I am today, as the first thing I looked up was the mysterious message that appeared on the screen after plugging back in:

> No OS found

=> ./index.gmi Index
=> ./2.gmi Ch. 2: First Exposure
=> ../../index.gmi Home