"When I first started with graphics - I plotted pixels onto the screen by calculating a memory address and then poking the corresponding value. Times have changed since then. My murky history contains gwbasic, STOS, HiSoft Basic (compiled!), VisualBasic (numerous versions) until I found C and AES (on the Atari ST), Win16 (that is Windows 3.1) and even Presentation Manager on OS/2 (in the pre-Warp days).
"Finding myself at university, I ran in to the Tru64 platform. That means Alphas and a Unix dialect that wasn't really compatible with anything that I knew. I dabbled with xlib and GTK but then some friends of mine and I set out to build KDE (the school provided FVWM). That meant building Qt along with loads of other stuff. This was a time when 64-bits was exotic - and guess what Tru64 runs on.
"If our hands weren't full from just building the project, we also had to build it on a temporary drive as our accounts where too limited. That meant keeping the build times short enough to avoid the rm -rf that was run on the temporary area every night by sysop."
