The DOS Era (Taylor’s Version)
I was around 6 when my parents gifted me my first PC, the Schneider Euro AT. They paid 50,000 drachmas, around ~$400 in today’s money, for the PC and a CRT monitor. I immediately got lost in its electronic glow (likely radiation emitted by the CRT monitor). And my fingers could not stop exploring a machine that would end up charting the course of my entire life.
The 4.77MHz Awakening
The Schneider Euro PC represented the vanguard of accessible home computing. It was one of the first IBM-compatible machines with integrated design and MS-DOS support, sporting an Intel 8088 CPU at 4.77MHz – the same processor that powered the original IBM PC. To put this in perspective, that’s about 100,000 times slower than today’s average smartphone. Data lived on 5.25” floppy disks, each holding a mere 360KB, less storage than a single smartphone photo today.
(More on floppy disks on my next article about my “Demoscene Era”, Taylor Swift style)
The AT version marked a quantum leap forward from the original model. Instead of the original’s basic CGA with its quirky 4-color palette, the Euro PC AT boasted EGA graphics capable of displaying 16 colors from a palette of 64. In an era where most computers could only display four colors at once, this made games look spectacular – at least through the eyes of a six-year-old.
Code, Pixels, and Promise
As many before me, I cut my gaming teeth on Zork. Never finished it, but it sparked something bigger: the urge to create. Armed with an ‘Introduction to BASIC’ book my dad gave me, I learned programming before multiplication tables, all to build my dream game.
My first creation? An unnamed text adventure about a kid named Vitali lost in a maze with a single match. Why one match? Nobody knows. It was way more GOTO spaghetti than clean code, but it represented pure crystallized childhood ambition.
Then Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia materialized on my screen, shattering my every preconception. It was my personal Plato’s cave moment. If my text adventure was shadow puppetry, Prince of Persia was cinema. Mechner had achieved the impossible in 1989 - he made pixels dance. On an Apple II, he created animation so fluid it felt like real life. I couldn’t believe it.
My GOTO-laden creation suddenly felt like describing ballet through Morse code. The gap between amateur enthusiasm and true mastery yawned like a canyon. I deleted my game and swore off creation for consumption.
Prince of Persia, *VGA vs EGA vs CGA vs CGA-Mono, Reddit
The ’90s hit like a technological tsunami. Windows crashed the DOS party, Sound Blaster cards gave machines their voice, VGA graphics exploded into 256 colors, and hard drives finally killed the floppy disk shuffle. I dived deep into LucasArts’ masterpieces (Monkey Island 2’s epic 11-disk saga), lost myself in Chris Jones’ noir-soaked Tex Murphy series, and marveled at Peter Molyneux’s Bullfrog revolution, from Populous, to Syndicate, to Magic Carpet I & II.
A lot of floppy disks
These games weren’t just entertainment – they were technological catalysts. 3DFX’s Voodoo graphics cards, essential for titles like Magic Carpet and Tomb Raider, helped birth modern GPU computing. When 3DFX folded, NVIDIA acquired their innovations. Their rival, ATI Technologies, was eventually acquired by AMD, resulting in the creation of the ‘Radeon’ line of GPUs. Gaming technology always shaped the semiconductor industry’s evolution.
This journey shaped me and my path. Hungry for more technology and needing to fund the appetite, I became a web designer in the pre-framework wild west. It was hard work, often tedious, but it kept me in the game. And then it became easier, as Wordpress and Joomla appeared and took all of the share. And then templates started appearing left and right, making the job less profitable, but much faster.
Full Circle: Pixels to Neural Networks
These days, I find myself reflecting on how different my life journey might have been with access to tools like ChatGPT and Claude. Recently, while creating the website for my AI music label, I witnessed Claude code an entire website in mere minutes – accomplishing in seconds what would have taken weeks in my early career. In just five prompts, it crafted both functional and aesthetically pleasing code, complete with CSS and JavaScript. The experience felt like watching Prince of Persia for the first time again – that same sense of witnessing something revolutionary. You can check the Midnight Nexus Records site for the cool animation that Claude created and download the template on Github.
So are the dangers around the use of AI/ML justified? Yes. Societies worldwide are still grappling with comprehending and managing this technology’s impact. Yet the fundamental human experience remains unchanged: each new technological wave brings both opportunity and challenge, inspiration and intimidation. This one feels as powerful as the steam engine.
I recently used my Meta Quest to watch videos while I was floating in virtual space during a flight to California, I couldn’t help but smile at how far we’ve come. From my first Schneider with its 16 colors to creating entire theaters in virtual reality – it’s the kind of leap that me as a kid, typing GOTO commands in BASIC, couldn’t have imagined. Yet that same sense of wonder persists. Whether it’s Prince of Persia’s fluid animation in 1989 or AI conjuring websites in 2024, technology still feels like magic.
That same magic that made my parents spend a year’s savings on a computer drives innovation today. Only now, instead of 16 colors, we’re painting with artificial intelligence and virtual reality. And somewhere, a six-year-old is experiencing their own technological awakening, learning about the world or building their own game with help from an AI.
And maybe that’s exactly what we need right now – a little bit of magic, a dash of hope, and the endless possibility of the next technological frontier. Thanks mum and dad.
Vitali