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Issue: 1.3 (December/January 2002)
Article Description: Geoff Perlman is the President and CEO of REAL Software. It is his vision that guides REAL Software and helps determine the future of REALbasic.
Article Length (in bytes): 16,293
Starting Page Number: 13
RBD Number: 1309
Resource File(s): None
Related Link(s): None
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
How did you get interested in computers?
When I was about 13, my dad (who was an Engineer at Rockwell International) brought home a Texas Instruments portable terminal so we could log into the VAX mainframe at Rockwell. This thing had no screen (just a therminal printer) and acoustic couplers that connected the handset of the phone. That was 1975.
The VAX had a BASIC interpreter so my dad and I would write little programs in BASIC. That was my first introduction to programming. My mom and I would play the original text adventure game called "adventure" (appropriately enough). We used to stay up until the wee hours of the morning playing that game. We would run out of paper and feed the used paper in upside down in an attempt to continue playing. It was great.
That got me interested in computers. When the Apple II came out, we got one (a clone, actually, called a Franklin ACE 1000). My dad bought me a book that covered BASIC and 6502 assembler. I decided to stick with BASIC.
I started writing little programs. Mostly, I wanted to write games. But I also was thinking about how I could make money writing software. So I started writing a game called Math Maze. The player would move through a maze and fight monsters. To kill a monster you had to solve a math problem. I quickly realized it was more work than I could handle so never finished it.
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Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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