“…when men were men and wrote their own device drivers.”* I’ve never gotten around to writing any serious device drivers, but a recent article by Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror reminded me of my first programming language: QBasic. I first started writing Basic programs in the early 90’s while in the eighth grade using Microsoft’s provided environment. (We created faux-”DOS Box” programs for Windows 3.1 which induced significant head scratching among the computer illiterate at my middle school.) What more could one want than an interpreter with as-you-type syntax checker and nary a native compiler to be found?
Well, at least it’s good to know that some things never change.
* With apologies to Linus Torvalds, of course.
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I was able to write my first linux kernel driver recently for my job here at HP. I have to say, it is kind of exciting, especially when you mess up and the whole thing locks up and the keyboard lights blink. My recommendation: develop inside a virtual machine that you can kill and restart as much as you want.
Hyrum, you’re awesome.