This post is a continuation of part 1
During my childhood, I was obsessed with mazes. I would spend hours drawing mazes with increasingly complex rules and I would force my parents and friends to solve them. I wanted to translate this to the computer.
Every so often, I would return to the challenge. Most of my mazes were built in Minecraft. Soon though, my mind started to connect the dots. Minecraft had convinced me that computers could be bent to my will. If I could understand how the game worked, maybe I could make my own world. I was convinced understanding the .bat script was the key.
Initially, I experimented. I vividly remember trying to rename the script, after which windows would yell out a scary warning about how changing an extension might make the file unusable. I quickly pressed cancel, hoping I did not break my game.
The first time I tried opening the minecraft.bat file in notepad, I was overwhelmed. A bunch of nonsensical garbage filled my screen. I did not know it at the time, but the people who shipped the cracked version obfuscated the script. It was not meant to be understood.
I borrowed more and more books on programming and computers from the library, slowly building an understanding of how mysterious lines of text made the computer do stuff.
I attempted many times to apply my knowledge. Most of my "programming" was copying code from books in notepad, trying to run it but not having the compilers or knowledge to execute my code. My computer was littered with hundreds of little files. maze.py, maze.php, maze.java. Each an attempt to achieve my dream of creating a maze. Each time, I faced disappointment when I double-clicked, and the computer told me that the file I just worked on was unrecognised.
However, there was one piece of code I wrote that actually worked. A small little batch script - welcoming me to a new world.
echo "Hello World"
A short while later the computer I was working on died. Being locked out of a world I had only just started exploring, I had to find other ways to scratch that itch...
This post will continue in a part 3
