In 1982 I got my first computer. It was a TI-99/4A. A neat little toy of a computer with just 4K of RAM, but I could make neat things happen. I loved it, and from that moment I knew what I would spend my life doing. It seemed like a lot of years later, but it was only 1986, when I bought a Commodore 64 with money I earned working at McDonald's. It was really worth all hard work mopping floors and cooking burgers.

Fast forward to 1989. Things were really getting serious. I had just finished high school and returned from a Foreign Exchange program in Germany. I didn't have the Commodore because I had to sell it for money to use in Germany. When I returned I really had an itch to code again. Without a computer at home I was left to rely on getting my coding fix by pair programming with my good highschool friend. We were writing a BBS program. We wrote it in quick basic for a Hayes 2400 baud modem. It was an amazing adventure. We used Turbo BASIC a great BASIC compiler, by Borland, for DOS.

Many hours and days passed as we learned to open the COM port and send AT commands to the modem until one day the software came to life. We were able to dial in from another friend's house and display some rough menus and send the user input back to our BBS software for processing. More months would pass and we'd have X-Modem, Y-Modem, and Z-Modem protocols launching as shell processes to provide support for uploads and downloads.

To be continued...

If you'd like to take a look at my boot.dev profile you can see the progress being made. The courses are pretty challenging and interesting even for veterans. I would highly recommend them just to keep yourself sharp.