Growing Up Geek (A Hanselmeme)

Scott Hanselman posted up a picture of himself as a young Hanseldork and then tagged myself and others in hope that we'd perform the same kind of self-humiliation.

That's what Scott looked like ---->

I'd like to think that I wasn't so geeky as all that. Kids that looked like Hanselman? I used to beat them up and steal their code.

Perhaps, now that i think of it, i was a little bit nerdy.

Is it nerdy for an 8 year old kid to spend lunchtime playing chess against the librarian? Is it nerdy to read and write elvish runes?

Perhaps my big brother Jeb had a touch of the nerd. He taught me binary, boolean logic, and he taught me to program in Basic on the beloved Amstrad CPC 6128.

I asked him the other day whether the CPC6128 booted straight into Basic, or there was an intermediate OS. Here was his response:

The programming commands available right from ON comprised "Amstrad BASIC".
The disk-related commands such as SAVE, CAT etc comprised "AMSDOS".
 
We had to put a special disk in and type |CPM [i.e bar + CPM] to get the CPM operating
system.  That's what we used for formatting or disk-to-disk copying.  Some
games ran on CPM so were launched by putting that game's disk in and
executing |CPM.  Most games and programs were executed with RUN
"<nameofgame>"...
 
Ahhhh, takes me back.
 
(In contrast, the Apple IIes at CBC [i.e. at school] always defaulted to booting from
whatever 5.25" floppy was in drive A - with B spare for a data disk.  In
those puppies you had to hold a switch on the back on startup for them to
go into command-line AppleBASIC.)

To fulfill the requirements of this meme, i ought to include a picture of what I looked like as a child. Here it is:

Not too dorky. Of course now that I'm grown up I look far more suave:

Smoking is cool, right?

To spread this viral meme I'd like to tag Justice Gray, JoCo Loco, Joel Pobar, the BronJohn collective and, for his sins against F#, Paul Stovell.

How about you? Grow up dorky? What's your story?

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