Article Preview
Buy Now
FEATURE
Interview: Joe Strout
Issue: 2.6 (July/August 2004)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Joe Strout is one the REAL Software engineers who helps create REALbasic. He implemented RB's support for 3D graphics. In addition to being active on the RB mailing lists, he frequently writes for RBD.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 12,449
Starting Page Number: 11
Article Number: 2608
Related Link(s): None
Excerpt of article text...
Hi Joe! Tell us about yourself. How did you get interested in computers?
How I got here is a bit of a long and convoluted story. I got interested in programming in third grade or so. There were no computers at home or at school at the time, but my older brother had a book on BASIC programming, so I wrote out simple programs for paper and got him or my dad to check my understanding of what they would do. Then in fifth grade or so, things got much better: I got to take a Saturday morning class in programming in BASIC on the Apple II, we got an Apple II in my classroom, and just a little after that, my parents bought us a TI 99/4A at K-Mart for $50. That was our first computer, and it's where my love of programming really took off.
A little bit after that, we got an Apple //e, which had an actual disk drive -- a huge improvement over the cassette tape for storing my programs! By this point programming was my primary hobby, though in school I remained strongly interested in things like science and math. I wanted to work in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) when I grew up, and I did a number of successful science fair projects in that area.
What kinds of projects did you do?
Mostly games. Like most kids, that was what got me into programming, and still what I enjoy doing in my spare time.
You couldn't do much in the way of action games in the interpreted BASIC that ran on the TI. So mostly puzzle games, text adventures, that sort of thing.
...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.