The Brave New Distribution Channel

You mushy brained fools, hulu is for computers, not for your televisions.

What did it for you?

comic from the fabulous XKCD

For me it was after 11th Grade, and a 6-week summer math program where one class in in the first 3 weeks involved playing with this interesting ‘Assembly Language’ thing (though I totally didn’t get the second session on ‘Pascal’). I don’t remember the platform. It was an emulator/teaching program of some kind.

Admittedly, 12th Grade AP Calculus also really helped though – mostly to begin developing more advanced problem solving strategies – not so much for the calculus.

And getting my first computer in 12th Grade – an Emerson 286 with an AMD 16 MHz 80286 (Intel’s only went to 12-something) and a 40MB HDD – running Compaq MS-DOS 3.31 – or some similar variant because MS-DOS 3.x didn’t support bigger HDD’s than 32MB. And I think 1MB of RAM. I didn’t understand any of the DOS versioning and the fact it wasn’t an Intel chip for several years.

Okay, there was a capstone moment like the weekend of Perl. I managed to get a copy of 4DOS from somewhere – I think this was right after starting at NC State. And 4DOS had a flag for the “del” command that allowed for recursively deleting things. You can imagine where this goes next.

Yep, my career was set in motion by 3 weeks of Assembly Language, AP Calculus, and one horrifying night where I recursively deleted most of the files on my 40MB HDD and key parts of the OS install with 4DOS.

Explains a lot doesn’t it?