Why I Am a Programmer

The writer explains becoming a programmer through an early fascination with computers and the people who could make them do seemingly extraordinary things. Growing up before the internet was commonplace, they and a small circle of children kept their computers discreet in a neighborhood where theft was a concern. They traded games on floppy disks, experimented with editing saved-game files in a hex editor to unlock powers and skip levels, and later explored bulletin board systems through a modem. That connection to the digital underground brought a stream of games - and, before many of them, short, vivid cracktros created by groups that had defeated copy protection.

Those cracktros felt less like advertisements than overwhelming, almost unreal experiences, and they revealed the creative force behind computer graphics. The writer traces their ambition to make such work to a BBS discovery: Denthor of ASPHYXIA’s tutorials, which taught readers to build demo effects in Pascal, from plotting pixels to 3D graphics, with source code included. They eagerly downloaded and printed the lessons, then typed them out despite knowing little about programming. The tutorials offered only a basic grasp of how the pieces fit together, but that was enough to change their goal. Rather than simply collecting or playing games, they wanted to create demos that could astonish viewers, seize their attention, and alter their sense of reality. Programming became a way to gain mastery over the machine and make experiences that felt magical.