I've been meaning to blog recently, but I haven't had much time to do so, and I also have to pick some interesting subject.
Since I couldn't come up with anything interesting for the time being, and because I can't even blog about taking my car to the track since I sold both my Challenger 392 and my Viper ACR (Insert super sad face here), I figured that I would take a trip down memory lane.
Building cabinets, not software
I wasn't even supposed to be in this line of work.
Originally, when I was about 14 or so, all I wanted to do was wood working, you know, like building cabinets, set of drawers etc. Cool stuff and I wasn't half bad with a chisel.
At the same time, my father helped me buy a Casio FP-200 which was pretty cool.
I started doing some programs in Basic and I got more and more interested in it. Between that and my mom telling me that working with wood is great, but that I would end up fingerless after a couple of years, I decided that I would pursue a career doing 'geeky computer stuff'.
Fast forward to when I got hired by Borland Intl. as a tech support.
Doing geeky stuff
That was the place where I met Fred and Christophe. Those two were working in the Localization Team and we quickly became friends, especially since we all had the same interests. Well, okay so, we were kind of geeky.
We started to write a bunch of different programs for MS-DOS at the time. Most of the time, we'd use Turbo Pascal to do so, but we moved on to x86 Assembly because that was rad! Plus, real programmers code with Assembly, that's a well known fact.
At that point we wrote a "demo", which was a small program written in Assembly and that had some CGA animations. Fred made some super cool molecule looking thing that was spinning, I made a lame ass chessboard that was scrolling infinitely with some mountains on top that were rotating from right to left (if you fail to understand the relationship between a chessboard and a bunch of mountains, you're not the only ones). Pretty sure there were a couple more animations in there, but I can't remember what they were.
Christophe got the music, and I have no idea how he digitized it, but I got a file and I programmed the SoundBlaster to play it.
Yes, that really is a 3.5" disk... it even says 1992-1993. I actually have two of those puppies.
I used a filter to make it look even cooler! Rad even!
I know what you are wondering, what the heck does DP stand for?
DP means Dark Priests. Right, so at the time we thought it was cool, and didn't realize how corny/cheesy/lame that was. Especially considering that none of us has a religious bone in their body...
Lord of the Rings and Hacking/Cracking
At first, you may wonder how LOTR and Hacking are related, right?
Well, they are not. It's just that Fred is a big fan of that book, and I wouldn't say that he forced me to read it, but after much reticence, I did.
I thought it was alright, but not really my cup of tea. Don't get me wrong, it's a good book, but I just couldn't really get into it. The hobbits are wimps and can't do crap, the humans and the orcs are dumb, and the dwarves are, well, dwarves, and the elves are a bunch of hippies with bows. I actually liked the dwarves, especially Gimli.
As we started doing stuff like writing computer viruses that didn't do anything bad (we were in it for the challenge of making undetectable stuff), cracking video games' protection, we decided to adopt some persona/avatar, so that if/when we would release the cracks, we'd used those names as the authors of such and such crack.
I was Gimli and Fred was the wimpy Frodo. Christophe, because of his advanced age (he's one year older than Fred and I) was much more serious and wiser, so he didn't really crack games, or at least not that I can remember of.
I don't think any of those hacks made it any further than Fred's living room. Again, we were just looking for the challenge. It took me two days to crack a game I didn't even play, although Fred did if I remember correctly. I must admit that I was quite proud of myself. The hack was not a simple op-code replacement in the binary, I had to do it while the program was running, so in-memory patching.
(I still think that was cool)
Tetrix for Béatrix
Before moving out, another member of the Localization Team and myself made a bet. That person was Béatrix, and I used to tease her all the time. At the time, she was working on Paradox for Windows, which was the competitor to DBase from Ashton Tate, which Borland acquired later for some messed up reason.
Anyway, Paradox had a scripting language named
ObjectPAL. I knew nothing about it, but I kept on telling Béa that it was super easy, etc. So, she challenged me and I told her that I would write a game of Tetris for her using that stuff, and I would do it in a week. Conceited much?
That week, I was half answering customer calls because I was busy reading the documentation for ObjectPAL. When Friday came, I had a working Tetris and I gave that to Béa, who, the very next Monday brought me a big box of chocolates. Sadly, my dog snatched the box and hate most of them (yes! he undeservingly survived).
Moving to California
In 1993 Fred moved to California and I followed him a few months later. We was super serious at the time, so no hacking or anything. We still had LAN parties during lunch time at work though.
I had a lot of time on my hands, so I started writing more programs for MS-DOS and eventually for Windows 3.1.
The last project I did on MS-DOS was an editor named TED. I have no idea why I named that thing TED, but I think it was an acronym for Turbo Editor & Debugger (maybe). I used Turbo Pascal with the Turbo Vision framework. It was an editor for Turbo Assembler.
That program had everything, like: syntax highlighting, options for everything, could compile your code and debug it. Had to play around with INT 1 and INT 3 for the debugging code.
It even had a shell exit so that you could run the MS-DOS CLI while the editor was still there and you had just about the full 640K usable memory too (was saving the runtime on disk).
Some guy from NY actually sent me $50 for it, even though I had posted it as Freeware. That was pretty nice of him.
What now?
A bit over 20 years later, I'm still in California, while most of the other French people I met here went back. Not too sure what they're all up to beside for Fred who's a
CTO as a Service.
I'm still doing side projects whenever I have some time to spare. A project that I started back in the late 90s was an Operating System. I'm still working on it even though I had a many years hiatus. About 4 years ago, I thought, why not give that a try again? So I did, Dusted off my i386 books and got back at it.
That thing boots but that's it. I run it via QEMU on Debian, and debug it with GDB, which works pretty well. I learned a lot about Linux while resuming that project.
I just wish I had more time, alas, it's not the case so it'll go on the back burner once again.
