Bruce Ide

I am a programmer with a funny last name. This is my story.

I was born in 1970. When I was 8, I saw Space Invaders for the first time. I didn't realize at the time that the feeling I felt when I saw it was nothing less than the finger of destiny.

When I was 13, my parents bought me a TI 99/4A for Christmas. The machine was only $50 because Texas Instruments had stopped making them due to a faulty power supply which had a nasty tendency to catch on fire (Mine never did.) Thus began the Lust for Power.

I played games on it for a while and then got bored and decided I wanted to write my own game, so I started looking into its embedded BASIC. I then begged my parents for the cartridge which would enable me to program assembly language on the machine. Its cost was greater than that of the machine itself.

I quickly discovered that a new school I'd transferred into had Apple //'s. This new dimension of power was compelling and I enrolled in every computer course they had. I took BASIC and advanced BASIC. Destiny was becoming manifest.

My father worked at Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute at the time and that was an instant in to their high school summer program. I entered after my sophomore year of High School and learned Watfiv in the first four week course and DEC Assembly language in the second four week course. I went back to High School after that summer and took beginning Pascal.

I did the High School Summer program thing again, this time with Chemistry and a wild ride of one language a week - LISP, Snobol, C and APL. I didn't like chemistry despite the blowing stuff up factor of the course. We didn't get in-depth enough with the languages to get a lot out of them.

We moved again for my senior year of high school or I'd have gone into the AP level Pascal course and we'd have started in on recursive descent parsers. The southern school where I moved didn't have much of a program at all, but I enrolled in their Fortran class. I spent the first couple of weeks teaching the class and the teacher how to use the Apple "OS" that the language came with. Our final project was to write something of our choosing in the language of our choosing. Most people chose Tic Tac Toe in Basic or Fortran. I wrote a graphing program in Pascal. I ended up having to take the pie graph portion of the program out due to memory limitations (It did work perfectly in test code though) but it still did bar graphs and line graphs quite nicely. It was so pressed for space that I had to swap the keyboard routines to floppy.

I went to Purdue University for a year after that, majoring in Computer Technology. I quickly realized that CPT was a non-major and left the school. I thought to work for a while before getting back into school. I thought I'd be flipping burgers or something like that and get bored of it quickly. Little did I know... I'd been looking for work for a few weeks and seeing an enigmatic ad in the paper reading "Xenix programmer needed. Call..." Finally I got annoyed and called the number. They said "Come out today and we'll see what you can do." I went out and they said "We just got this system, we don't know how to use it." I sat down, logged in as super user and did a "ls -al." They said "That's more than we've been able to do. When can you start?" I started the next monday.

I've worked a variety of jobs since then, mostly leaning toward C and UNIX. Object Oriented programming was something I did't see in the real world until quite recently, and most of the OO programmers I've seen out here aren't that good at it. Actually, most of the programmers I've seen out here aren't that good at it. I've spent most of my career at various positions in IBM, oddly enough.

You can find my rather sparse web page at http://www.flying-rhenquest.net.

You can find a rather bizarre short story I wrote at http://www.flying-rhenquest.net/London_Otter_Sequence.txt.

Yeah, I found it, all right. I hope you've seen a professional since then, fella. Whoa! Weirdness. Interesting and strange.

I just read your short story. Very cool and creative. Judging from it I would say you are very good at programming and no doubt do excellent work. Intelligent and creative people like you always do. Kudos to you for posting it ! The loser above who suggested you should "see a professional" clearly displays his own mediocrity and rigidness which surely makes his work likewise. You, Bruce, rock on like the wizard rocker you are, man !!!

How do you know what kind of professional the "loser" is talking about? Could be a professional publisher.

Short story is pretty original and it's good.

You should write an editor and name it after yourself!

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