You've Been....Thunderstruck!
When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop. - Alan Perlis
What's this all about you might ask? Well, it's a rather long story actually. You see, I've always had a fascination with computers and the many things you can do with them. How they can be programmed to be anything you want them to be or operate pretty much anything you might want. When I was about 15 years old I got my very first computer. It was a brand new Commodore Vic-20 with a dataset storage attachment. Oh it was awesome to me at the time. My best friend Layne and I spent hours and hours over the summer PEEKing and POKEing to create our very own flight simulator program called Messerschmitts and Mustangs as well as an Artificial Intelligence chatting program called Basement Man (Don't Ask).
I took computer maintenance courses in High School where we used TRS-80 machines with 5 1/4 inch floppies and even received an Ann Brannon Award for my work in that class over the course of three years. After High School I went to I.T.T. Technical Institute in Arlington but after six months dropped out of the course with the intention of continuing my formal training at a later time but life kind of took over and I never did. I did, however land a decent job working for American Airlines. For the first 13 months it wasn't so good, I was literally sweeping the floors and driving scrubbing machines in the terminals at D/FW Airport. Later I upgraded into a Utility position which paid better and gave me an opportunity to learn more things. In 1996 the department I was working in got contracted out but I was able to test into a new position as a Plant Maintenance Man (Originally in Automotive Maintenance but later in Facilities Maintenance). Which is where I have pretty much been ever since. There's more about that on my Let's Fix It! page.
It's not so much what I was doing while working at American Airlines that pertains to this story as it was what I've been doing on my off time for the past 17 years while I've worked there. From 1992 to 1995 I ran a small, 4 line BBS called The Earth Club. For those of you who don't know, BBS's are what most computer enthusiasts used to get online, share files, play games, send and receive messages and such before the internet became so readily available. Mine was on a network called FidoNet as well as having a UseNet gateway to carry newsgroup messages from a local internet provider. If I recall correctly my FidoNet address was 1:130/507. Around 1995 I got my first dialup shell access account with a local internet provider. Whoah! It didn't take me long to see that with the amount of files available through FTP, the shear volume of content available on the WWW, IRC chat, full UseNet news feeds and tons of online MUDs to play games on that the days of little mom and pop BBSs were over. So I started learning HTML and later javascript and later still Java and a few other things along the way and eventually had a decent little side business building what I was calling at the time brochure websites for small local businesses to get them on the internet and provide them with a presence through which to contact new customers. It was working out pretty well for me until, oh, about 2001. By that time there were a lot of WYSIWYG editors on the market like FrontPage, Dreamweaver, etc. So a lot of that HTML, etc. that I learned and coded by hand could now be done by just about anyone, faster and better without even having to learn to code. So, some of my customers started getting their college kids to do for free what I used to make decent money doing. Don't get me wrong, I loved the WYSIWIG editors myself and am using one right now as a matter of fact. But also, the dot com bubble was bursting that year and most of the rest of my customers simply went out of business and dissappeared.
Well, there's more but maybe it would be best if I move all of this over to the Blog as it's getting kinda long winded...
- Troy Young
