Extra Life

I just finished David Bennahum’s awesome book called Extra Life: Coming of Age in the Cyberspace. The book is a great read for people interested in computers. It tells the story of how David, as the first generation of kids who grew up with computers, bought his first computer and started living his life through the keystrokes of a machine.

There are many excellent point made in the book that made me think. As a person who grew up in Istanbul, computers didn’t enter into my life until I was in fifth grade. My Commodore 64, floppy drive and dot matrix printer from those days is still sitting in storage in my parent’s house. The interesting thing is, I never had the community that David had at school. In my high school there were no computer classes until after I graduated. Maybe this was because I went to an all-girls school or maybe the whole country was behind, I’m not exactly sure. Either way, I never saw a Macintosh, let alone a UNIX machine, till I stepped into the clusters of Carnegie Mellon. Filled with kids who’d had a computer since they could walk and ones who had already programmed in several languages before they made it to college, it was no wonder that I felt intimidated in my computer science classes. I was thinking, as I read this book, that it’s amazing how much I’ve learned in the almost eight years I’ve been in this country. Then again, in some ways I’ll probably never catch up to those kids who, like David, grew up hacking with 1,200 baud modems.

While reading the part about Zork and how he and his roommate stayed up until late hours, playing the game for several weeks straight, I was reminded of my college years when sleep wasn’t really an issue. I remember when my friends and I spent endless hours playing the LucasArts game Full Throttle. College is a time when you do fun things just cause they’re fun. You listen to the same song over and over again or you yell out an inside joke (“I’ll never find that secret passage”) and laugh till you pee. You stay up all night, making the most of your T-3 line. I’m not sure what happens once you graduate; maybe because you have to get up and go to work in the morning, or because you no longer live in a building where the average age is 19, you just don’t pull all-nighters anymore. You don’t spend several weeks playing Doom across the network, boding with strangers as you try to sneak up on them and blow their brains out. I really think college is magical and unfortunately, as it is with all good things, you never appreciate it till it’s over.

I laughed as I read Harvard’s lack of foresight on computers and what they represented for our future. Then again, Harvard has never been famous for their innovative technology. The interviews with Microsoft also made me chuckle out loud. As I read that he was excited about Microsoft, I felt terrified cause I’m a firm hater of the company, the further I read, the more I enjoyed what happened. Microsoft has never been and will never be about innovation.

Finally, the issues of sharing code and not keeping secrets intrigued me. It’s interesting that, in the beginning, people shared code and promoted the idea of building on top of their programs to make it more custom to your wants or to perfect it further. As companies like Microsoft and others emerged, the programs became close boxes that didn’t dare share the details or ‘secrets’ of how they functioned. With the Open Source Movement we’re returning back to the time when programmers can see the magic behind a program and tweak it and learn from it. I think that’s the true power of computing. The idea of sharing and learning through the wisdom of others is what will bring programming to another level.

Here‘s more of David’s work. If you couldn’t figure it out from my long passages above, I highly recommend this book.