I was in college for Religious Studies and Philosophy with no plan on how I was going to turn that into money. I knew HTML/CSS/JS and made crappy websites for roleplaying games I played online through chat systems on AOL and ultimately on a site called WBS (Web Broadcasting System). It was one of the earliest web-based chats that was all in browser. They had your typical stuff for back then: teen chat, sports chat, etc. I happened to frequent the RPG chats where diceless roleplaying took place, in particular a room called Roland's Cavern.
Eventually WBS was bought out by Disney and absorbed into Disney's Go.Com platform, pushed into Java applet based chat (so we lost a lot of features we liked for RPGs like dice rolling, images, etc). Eventually Disney killed all the RPG rooms, keeping the rest.
Since I was making crappy GeoCities/Angelfire sites for our game, my friends asked if I could build our own chat system.
Enter Sam's Publishing "Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours". My first programming book.
So I read that. Learned some Linux stuff around Apache and tricking it into streaming content by not sending size of content to the browser allowing for constant streaming chat (this is days of frames, no one was talking about AJAX yet, no XHR being used mostly cause I didn't know about it or hell I don't know if it was around yet).
Then I built our chat system, launched our own site (NexusRP.com, funny to look at on WayBack Machine nowadays .. 640x480 website designs ftw!), and we played like that for a long time.
By then I was doing work study at college to pay for tuition. I took a job as a petri-dish-washing-floor-sweeping student assistant in the School of Neurobiology working for one of the Neurobiology professors. Besides washing petri dishes and sweeping up, they also taught me how to use a micro-tome (I think that is the name, it has been a while) to cut up cat brain slices.
She then found out I knew some web stuff, so asked me to build a site for her and her grad students. I did, then that expanded to another doctor, then the department. Then I built a web-based learning / quizzing platform for the whole Histology course where I sat in the morgue area in the basement, scanned in 1500 2x2 slides of histology "thingies" (don't know what to call them now), and made that software.
Pretty proud of that accomplishment, I realized there was going to be no money in Religious Studies (took me long enough to realize that), so I sent my resume to a local ad agency that was doing web dev and I got hired on.
tl;dr: I became a programmer so I could build a roleplaying chat system for me and my nerdy friends.
It's amazing how far the Web has come from its early days. I was especially intrigued by how you didn't include the Content-Length header to allow a constant stream of data. It's bad practice now, but that must've been really ingenious at the time.
It was quite the hack but worked well and only occasionally would you have to "reconnect" but I built that in as well and the end of the stream would always include a hyperlink to reload the content area and start it up again, giving the content from the last time you saw.
I still have the source code. I should get it up and running some time to see how bad it is. Haha.
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I owe my career to being an RPG nerd.
I was in college for Religious Studies and Philosophy with no plan on how I was going to turn that into money. I knew HTML/CSS/JS and made crappy websites for roleplaying games I played online through chat systems on AOL and ultimately on a site called WBS (Web Broadcasting System). It was one of the earliest web-based chats that was all in browser. They had your typical stuff for back then: teen chat, sports chat, etc. I happened to frequent the RPG chats where diceless roleplaying took place, in particular a room called Roland's Cavern.
Eventually WBS was bought out by Disney and absorbed into Disney's Go.Com platform, pushed into Java applet based chat (so we lost a lot of features we liked for RPGs like dice rolling, images, etc). Eventually Disney killed all the RPG rooms, keeping the rest.
Since I was making crappy GeoCities/Angelfire sites for our game, my friends asked if I could build our own chat system.
Enter Sam's Publishing "Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours". My first programming book.
So I read that. Learned some Linux stuff around Apache and tricking it into streaming content by not sending size of content to the browser allowing for constant streaming chat (this is days of frames, no one was talking about AJAX yet, no XHR being used mostly cause I didn't know about it or hell I don't know if it was around yet).
Then I built our chat system, launched our own site (NexusRP.com, funny to look at on WayBack Machine nowadays .. 640x480 website designs ftw!), and we played like that for a long time.
By then I was doing work study at college to pay for tuition. I took a job as a petri-dish-washing-floor-sweeping student assistant in the School of Neurobiology working for one of the Neurobiology professors. Besides washing petri dishes and sweeping up, they also taught me how to use a micro-tome (I think that is the name, it has been a while) to cut up cat brain slices.
She then found out I knew some web stuff, so asked me to build a site for her and her grad students. I did, then that expanded to another doctor, then the department. Then I built a web-based learning / quizzing platform for the whole Histology course where I sat in the morgue area in the basement, scanned in 1500 2x2 slides of histology "thingies" (don't know what to call them now), and made that software.
Pretty proud of that accomplishment, I realized there was going to be no money in Religious Studies (took me long enough to realize that), so I sent my resume to a local ad agency that was doing web dev and I got hired on.
tl;dr: I became a programmer so I could build a roleplaying chat system for me and my nerdy friends.
It's amazing how far the Web has come from its early days. I was especially intrigued by how you didn't include the
Content-Lengthheader to allow a constant stream of data. It's bad practice now, but that must've been really ingenious at the time.It was quite the hack but worked well and only occasionally would you have to "reconnect" but I built that in as well and the end of the stream would always include a hyperlink to reload the content area and start it up again, giving the content from the last time you saw.
I still have the source code. I should get it up and running some time to see how bad it is. Haha.