I have been a developer since the early 80's and have coded on a VIC-20, C-64, C-128, TRS-80 (I, III, and IV), PC (DOS, 95, 98, XP, and now 7...skipped Vista), Mac (OS/X only), iPod Touch/iPhone (thoroughly hated coding on these), and now the Droid. I have used Assembler, BASIC, COBOL, Pascal, Prolog, C, C++, C#, Objective C, Java, JavaScript, PHP, PERL, HTML, ActionScript (3.0)...and likely more. I've also written numerous game development articles and had two books published on 2D game development as well.
Well, after all of this I had finally gotten to the point (about 5 years ago) where coding started losing the same level of excitement that it used to have. I still love coding games, but just plain coding, tinkering, and hacking is not all that thrilling anymore.
Fortunately, I picked up the book "Code", by Charles Petzold last week and I have suddenly realized the problem. I miss the days of the VIC-20, C-64, and all the other nerdy machines made! There is so much abstraction now that the tinkering and hacking just doesn't have that same draw. At least not for me. Mr. Petzold really brought me back to my roots with his excellent book.
I'm planning to order a NerdKit (
http://www.nerdkits.com) later this week, and will eventually like snag a Tower System (
http://www.towergeeks.org/page/the-tower-system) before I finally join up for the Game Institute class on creating your own video game console and game (
http://www.gameinstitute.com/Video_Game_Console_Design.html).
I've never been much into electronics, so it will also be an exciting new jump into a technological area. Building stuff and the coding to it just sounds so cool that I must give myself a +2500 geek points immediately upon completion of my first project. Sadly this stuff is not cheap and in this economy there is a lot of penny-pinching going on. So it's going to take some time to get things going, but that's cool. There are loads of FREE sites out there and plenty of cheap used books to read at nights and on the weekends when there is time.
I loved tinkering with the old Commodore's and TI's back in the day and I'm already excited about the potentialities of these little kits. But (those of you who know me) this is not a take-over-the-world situation for me. I'm going to treat this as
nothing but a hobby. No deadlines, no next-biggest-thing projects...just nerdy learning and geeky fun. That's it.
It's like a technological breath of fresh air to go back to a point where abstraction is minimal. Many of these kits offer C as the connection point, and I'll likely utilize that on tougher projects, but wherever possible I'm using Assembler (or ML, if at all possible!). I can already imagine spending hours and hours fiddling with a project whereby I toil and toil using Assembler and various schematics to satisfy a project that simply makes an LED blink once. Yes, it's essentially pointless, but damn if it ain't cool!
So, if you're looking to get that old-skool interest again, check out Petzold's book. It's an interesting read and it may serve re-spark your nerdiness too.
