I was curious as a child to know how on earth that these programs did what they did. You ran them and they did something useful, and a human made them. I was just amazed at how they could do different things on the same machine. The same machine could run a game, a calculator, or something else without you having to change it. They all ran. How is this possible. I spent some time opening them with EDIT on DOS and I gleaned a few strings and words.

I even created a text file and changed its extension to .COM and .EXE and tried to run it. I'm not sure what I expected but I expected it to do something and it didn't, it wasn't a valid application , so I wanted to learn how to make a valid one.

I was a child and started learning BASIC. Mainly going through the help, instruction by instruction. Typing in snippets from the help and running them, then changing things, seeing what broke and trying to figure out failure patterns and find causality. It may not have been the best strategy but I was less than 9 in 96 and we didn't have Internet. I was able to ask my older brother questions though.

It was just fascinating. The first program I was really proud of was a geography one. I used to look up countries in dictionaries.

I got the idea that I could write a program that gave you all information. So I entered all the countries painstakingly. The data was of course part of the program.

The program takes the country name, in capital letters or it didn't work, and it returns the details(population, surface area, capital).

It was not much and I recall trying to find "users" in my family members. "Say you're curious about Bolivia and want to know more... What do you do?"

Answer: I look it up in the dictionary.

Me: or you run this program and you type the country name in capital letters and it gives you all the information you need.

I was hooked. Seeing those games and tools do what they did, I wanted to learn to build things that were so useful.