Why I Like Computers · Suttisak Denduangchai

Part 1: Before I Knew What Programming Was

I cannot remember exactly when I became interested in computers. As far back as I can remember, they had already been around me since kindergarten.

One of the first times I used a computer was probably when I was in kindergarten, at the provincial public health office where my parents worked. It had a monochrome monitor and a TURBO button on the front. The name made it sound as though pressing it should make the computer faster. As far as I remember, pressing it actually made the computer slower.

In the evenings, I would play a golf game and a boxing game there.

The office still had typewriters too. To a kindergartener, a typewriter was another kind of toy. I liked pressing several keys at once until all the typebars flew up and jammed together. Then I would sit there trying to separate them and push them back down.

I probably did not wonder how any of those machines worked. Pressing something and seeing something happen was already fun enough.

Our first computer at home

When I was in my third year of kindergarten, my father bought a computer with an Intel 80486 CPU for our home. After that, I began using computers more seriously.

By "seriously," I mean playing games.

There were DOS games such as The Lion King and A-Train, along with several others whose names I can no longer remember.

Around Grades 1 or 2, I also began playing around with Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. I pasted in Clip Art and made whatever slides I felt like making. There was no assignment to submit and no presentation to give in front of the class.

I did it because it was fun.

That was probably one of the first times I felt that a computer was not limited to things other people had made for me. I could use it to make something of my own, even if that something was a PowerPoint presentation full of Clip Art.

The HTML book I could not preview

Around the same time, my mother bought me a book about HTML.

I opened the book and typed out the examples. There was <HTML>, there was <BODY>, and there were < and > symbols everywhere.

The problem was that our computer still ran Windows 3.11 and did not have a web browser that made it easy to see what I had written.

My first web project ended fairly quickly.

I could write it, but I could not see it.

So I put it aside.

The same thing would happen many more times. I would find something I wanted to try, buy a book, type out the examples, and eventually hit a wall that I did not yet know how to get past.

I would put it aside and come back to it later.

Pentium III

When I was in Grade 3, my father bought a new computer: an Intel Pentium III 500 MHz with an NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 Model 64.

It initially ran Windows 98. We later changed it to Windows Me.

That computer stayed with me for several years, and I have many more memories of it.

The games I played during that period included Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Holiday Island, SimCity 3000, and SimCity 3000 Unlimited.

When we were using Windows Me, I also played Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings.

Another game I loved was the original The Sims. I started playing when the Livin' Large expansion had already come out, and I played it often.

So it would not be true to say that I spent my entire childhood studying computers, building websites, and writing programs.

Most of the time, I was still playing games.

Returning to HTML

The difference between this computer and the 80486 was that this one had a browser.

The HTML I had once written without being able to see finally began to mean something.

I tried Microsoft FrontPage, followed later by Macromedia Dreamweaver. These programs let me build websites by dragging things into place. If I wanted text, an image, a table, or a button, I could place it on the page, and the program would generate the HTML behind it.

I did not understand much HTML at the time.

The problems began when I wanted to do something for which Dreamweaver did not have a button.

I wanted to add more interesting behavior to my websites, so I bought a JavaScript book and typed out the examples one by one.

The JavaScript book

My way of learning was fairly straightforward:

Want to do something → find it in a book → type it out → run it

If it worked, good.

If it did not, I went back to see what I had typed incorrectly.

There was no Stack Overflow to search then. There was certainly no AI into which I could paste my code and ask, "Why doesn't this work?"

Sometimes the problem was not even in the code.

There was something behind the website

After making websites for a while, I began to understand that what appeared on the page was not the whole website.

If I wanted to build a webboard, a membership system, or something that stored data, another program had to be working behind it.

That was when I came across CGI. Later, I bought a book about ASP: Active Server Pages 3.0.

I spent some time following the examples before finding a new problem.

Windows Me did not have IIS.

Put simply:

This time, I could write the program, but I had no server on which to run it.

So I put it aside again.

The ASP book

A calculator Windows already had

Around Grade 3, I also bought a Visual Studio 6 CD to try.

I no longer remember where I first saw it or why I wanted to try it. I do remember making a simple calculator program.

I placed buttons on a window and wrote what should happen when each button was pressed.

Press a button → the code runs → a result appears

It sounds very ordinary. Windows already had a calculator that was better than mine in every possible way.

But it felt different from using someone else's program.

This time, the button on the screen was there because I had put it there. It worked because of code I had written.

I was not yet thinking about why I should write software, whether anyone would use it, or whether it might become a career.

Making something and seeing it work was already fun enough.

Homepages and pizza

When I was in Grade 4, my school sent me and a friend to compete as a team in a homepage-building competition. We used Dreamweaver.

I no longer remember the topic. I do not remember our final place either. I only know that we did not come first and that we returned with some sort of prize.

What I remember more clearly than the prize is that our computer teacher took us out for pizza afterward.

If you ask which mattered more to a fourth grader, a prize from a homepage competition or pizza, I think the answer is fairly clear.

Windows XP and the ASP I had put aside

Windows XP came out in 2001, when I was in Grade 4.

I installed it myself on the Pentium III at home. I had generally installed Windows and other software myself and rarely took the computer to a shop.

As I went through the installation and saw that IIS was available, I remember being very happy.

The ASP examples I had tried to write from the book but could not run on Windows Me finally had somewhere to work.

I went back to the same book and tried examples involving webboards, image uploads, and web pages with code running on the server.

Of course, all of this was still running on my own computer.

There were no users.

There was no production environment.

There was no cloud.

And nobody was inconvenienced when I broke it.

Still, it was different from writing HTML.

Before, I wrote a file and the browser opened it.

Now I could send something in, and the server could process it and return something in response.

The computer no longer just displayed what I made. It could do something for me.

I did not yet know that any of this was called frontend, backend, or full stack.

I only knew that it was fun.

And when I got bored, I closed Dreamweaver and went back to playing games.

56K modem

Another world had opened up at the same time.

This part had begun when I was in Grade 3, but I have not mentioned it yet.

Unlike the previous computer, the Pentium III was no longer alone in the house. It could connect to other computers through a small box that made a strange noise through the speaker every time we used it.

A 56K modem.

While the internet was connected, nobody could use the home telephone. A single web page could take a long time to load, and its images would slowly appear from top to bottom.

But whatever lay at the other end of that telephone line was much larger than every computer book I owned.

There was Sanook.

There was Thaiware.

Later, there was Google.

There were webboards, other people, online games, and answers to questions I could not find in books.

That was probably another point when the way I used computers began to change.

Until then, a computer contained only what we had installed on its hard disk.

Then, suddenly, it could connect to the world outside.