If you are a follower of recomputing, maybe you noticed it when you saw the interactive black mirror episode Bandersnatch on Netflix. It depicts a young British bedroom programmer entering the home computer game industry in the early 1980s, which is certainly fictional and dramatic, but for those who are interested in similar events in real life rather than the protagonist’s addiction to supernatural books, Recently, there was an epic twitter thread describing the way an industry veteran entered the industry.
Such an admission letter from artistic software was the craziest dream of bedroom programmers in the early 1980s.
Such an admission letter from artistic software was the craziest dream of bedroom programmers in the early 1980s.
[sashid Kamal Ahmad] now has an impressive investment portfolio. He has been in the forefront of the game industry for nearly forty years, but his story began in 1982 when he was a British Pakistan teenager with diabetes. He had no privileged background in London and wrote in BASIC on his Atari 400. His basic game is very good, but it is not enough to be recognized by the publisher, so he sold his precious BMX bike and bought a book about Atari 6502 assembly. Atari 6502 assembly is a coffee filter. Out of curiosity, [Rodney Zaks] programmed for Z80. Then came a three-month obsession with 6502 programming and Atari architecture. His tea cup storm game was sold to artistic software. He is a professional game developer.
We followed him to complete more projects until he came to Liverpool’s software project to try to sell his “Hahn’s game facebook”. He won the copyright for “Hahn’s game facebook”, but also got a lifetime opportunity. Jet Willie is the annual hot spot on the ZX spectrum. They urgently need a 64 port brigadier general. Can he finish the work in four weeks? If he can manage for three weeks, can he still get a bonus? Then he entered the field of high-pressure assembly coding and learned the quirks between two completely different 8-bit architectures. This is an epic in itself, but he only completed the work in the shadow in three weeks, and they still gave him a bonus. His career in the computer game industry has been consolidated.
Through this story, Britain can be seen everywhere in the 1980s. It is far from bringing a retro paradise, but a hollow place due to industrial recession. There is little optimism for people at the bottom of society. His description of random racism is very powerful, but those computer addicted friends in school may be reminiscent of all teenagers interested in this direction in this era. The real hero in the story may be his mother. She somehow found the resources of yadali 400 and provided him with much-needed support and encouragement.
This clue captures a unique and never repeated era in which a teenager can master and make a living in an emerging technology without expensive education. Just as Bill herd described his career in Commodore at the same time, this book is well worth reading.