I think I was 11 or so when I went to a summer camp with my new laptop (an old thing that I got for free on the fleamarket). The idea was to play games on it - unfortunately it hadn't any on it.
One of the parents there then remebered that there's often some sort of BASIC preinstalled on these DOS/Win3.11-machines which normally had some demo-code (including games).
It turned out that there was indeed one (Gorillas, an artillery/worms-like game), but got quickly boring. So he showed my friend and me some basic commands for QBASIC and the rest is history ;)
I have some fond memories of that (and subsequent) camps, like trying to figure out if RAND() would actually return 0 or only bigger numbers. So we just wrote a program that generated random numbers and would stop if it encoutered a zero. Then we let it run while we went hiking trough some mountains.
Another fun thing was to figure out new instructions. There was a manual, but we couldn't read it because it was in english. But it had a nice list of all the commands. So we took one that sounded cool and tried to figure out what it did.
After that, my friend got a laptop too and we would try to out-code the other. One time, we tried to implement an "operating system" (it consisted of a long and fancy start-up animation and a nice menu to launch other programs). Every time, one of us implemented a new feature into his "OS", he increased the version number, copied it on a floppy and went around screaming "Guys! Look! This the newest version of my OS!"
I think I was 11 or so when I went to a summer camp with my new laptop (an old thing that I got for free on the fleamarket). The idea was to play games on it - unfortunately it hadn't any on it.
One of the parents there then remebered that there's often some sort of BASIC preinstalled on these DOS/Win3.11-machines which normally had some demo-code (including games). It turned out that there was indeed one (Gorillas, an artillery/worms-like game), but got quickly boring. So he showed my friend and me some basic commands for QBASIC and the rest is history ;)
I have some fond memories of that (and subsequent) camps, like trying to figure out if RAND() would actually return 0 or only bigger numbers. So we just wrote a program that generated random numbers and would stop if it encoutered a zero. Then we let it run while we went hiking trough some mountains.
Another fun thing was to figure out new instructions. There was a manual, but we couldn't read it because it was in english. But it had a nice list of all the commands. So we took one that sounded cool and tried to figure out what it did.
After that, my friend got a laptop too and we would try to out-code the other. One time, we tried to implement an "operating system" (it consisted of a long and fancy start-up animation and a nice menu to launch other programs). Every time, one of us implemented a new feature into his "OS", he increased the version number, copied it on a floppy and went around screaming "Guys! Look! This the newest version of my OS!"
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