Category: Essay (Page 2 of 2)

Continued from Part Two.

In Grade 11 I took my first programming class. Although I had played around with Logo in elementary school, and had created many complicated DOS Batch files, this was my introduction to all the formal elements of modern computer programming. We learned Turing, an educational object-oriented language developed at the University of Toronto. I wrote a multiplayer Tron/Snake-style game which would send each players key-presses back and forth across the network, but it often got out of sync resulting in the screens of both players looking different and perhaps both thinking they had won or lost. My final class project was a graphical implementation of  Battleship. In Grade 12 we learned Java, an language with plenty of actual real-world usage.…

As you can see from part one, each modern computer itself is a vast terrain for exploration. Every application is a maze of screens and dialogues and options, providing tools which offer an incalculable variety of possible workflows and possibilities. Operating systems themselves are highly configurable and have deep levels of access and abstraction going down from the high-level user interface deep into the internals upon which it depends. All the files and resources which came with software can be pulled apart and opened, modded and configured. A modern computer is an entire cyberspace in and of itself.

The Web

But, of course, once the internet gets thrown into the mix, computers often seem to become flattened into mere machines which run your web browser. It wasn’t always this way, but started in 1993 when the world wide web …

Everyone has their own cyberspace; this is the story of mine.

My family first got a computer when I was about 6 years old. It was a Compaq Contura 4/25c laptop, a 486 computer running DOS with Windows 3.1. There were two games, both for DOS. One was a Berenstain Bears colouring book, the other was educational involving several minigames with a frog and lilypads. I spent a lot of time exploring every nook and cranny of that computer. I discovered typing “help” at the DOS prompt provided a list of commands to try out. I found the “dosshell” which I thought was edgy because it had the word “hell” in its name. I liked watching the Surface Scan in ScanDisk. I couldn’t figure out the difference between edit.com and qbasic.com beyond a few extra menu entries. I increased our …