From BASIC on a Red‑White Console to Linux BBS: A 10‑Year Coding Journey

Discover what it feels like to code for ten years through a personal narrative that starts with a childhood BASIC program on a red‑white Laser‑310 game console, continues through high‑school DBASE/FoxBASE+ projects, and evolves into university C/C++ and web development, culminating in Linux BBS automation.

0: Elementary School Device: Red‑white game console Laser‑310 Language: BASIC The author’s first programming experience involved writing small programs on the console, saving them to a cassette recorder, and loading them later. Programs included a simple address book, a random music generator, and ASCII animations.

# Laser‑310 # The school’s computer class also used the Laser‑310, where the author spent most of his time writing BASIC programs while classmates preferred a Chinese learning machine for games.

1: Middle School Device: PC/AT, 286 Language: DBASE3 / FoxBASE+ The author helped his father fix bugs in a printing program and continued to develop a contact‑management application using the interactive database software.

2: University Device: Pentium PC Languages: C, C++, HTML, XML, VRML A group of six students pooled resources to buy a 166 MHz Pentium machine. The author wrote a Visual Basic scheduler to share computer time, then created a C graphics program that unfortunately burned out the graphics card.

He later joined a Linux club, using GCC and VI to write a BBS user‑tracking robot that sent online status updates to a Motorola pager via HTTP requests. The robot collected data for all BBS users, displayed it on a web page, and was eventually integrated into the BBS system, though a bug caused all user IDs to become uppercase.

The story illustrates the evolution of tools—from BASIC on a cassette‑based console to modern Linux development—and the perseverance required to overcome hardware failures, software bugs, and limited resources.