Project One: An Ode to my Youth

When I was a young teen in 1993ish, I saved up all summer long from cutting grass and purchased a computer.  It was a 386DX (SC stands for Sucks!) with a 2400 baud modem.  From the time I got it until...well.. ever computers have been at the center of whatever I was doing.  Beyond adventure games such as King's Quest, Space Quest, and Quest for Glory I began to call up a series of local Bulletin Board Systems known then as BBSes.  On these things you could interact with other outcasts, surly teens, and general weirdos from your local area.  This would also tie up your phone line indefinitely or ring up a lot of charges if you were calling a BBS which was "long distance" which is another relic of the past.

At any rate, I played daily games on them such as Trade Wars, Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD!), and Barren Realms Elite (BRE).  In these games, one would get a limited number of turns to take each day and slowly level.  In many ways they were precursor to today's online games such as League of Legends and World of Warcraft.  The downside, outside of a few ANSI intro screens, they were mostly all text.  Primarily, this was due to the fact that unless one had a blazing fast 14,400baud (or an UNTHINKABLE 28,800baud) modem the ANSI would take forever to load.  That said, they were still really fun and were really amazing to a 14 year old me!  Playing games with other people remotely, even if only mildly interactive, was a total revelation.  I became so obsessed with the games that I started my own series of terrible, humiliating, and downright bad BBSes with an sorry collection of names I will not reveal here.

Why do I write about these?  Because I am going to make my own version of one of them as coding practice.  I read about this idea on a Ruby forum where you write your own program to help reinforce the techniques you are learning as you go and thought it would be a really great idea.  Therefore, I am trying this as both a way to relive my youth and practice code so that I will hopeful retain more of it.

Talk to you soon, I will post my code here as I get more of it done and welcome any feedback on it!

Total hours into Programming: 47 (0 so far today)
Chris Pine's Learn to Program (Finished with Chapter 8 of 14)
Progress on Hartl's Tutorial Ready to start Chapter 3! 
Code Academy Points: 495
Code Academy Badges: 54
Code Academy Skills Finished: 2 (Make a Website, Ruby)