Picture that makes you touched; The Dawn of Code: MASM, BASIC, and the Birth of Logic

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It was 1981.

I was not yet a programmer — only a curious boy watching his father work in an office filled with the rhythmic hum of typewriters and a strange new machine called a dedicated word processor. On the far side of that desk stood something even more mysterious: a terminal linked to a computer that spoke a language known as MASM — Microsoft Macro Assembler.

I didn’t have my own computer yet, but I was already fascinated by how those short cryptic lines — MOV, INT, JMP — could make a screen respond. That was the moment the seed was planted: logic had a rhythm, and electricity had a soul.

Then came 1984.

My father brought home a miracle — an IBM 5150 with a starting RAM of 128 KB. Later we expanded it to the mythical 640 KB, and added a Seagate 5 MB hard disk that clicked like a heartbeat each time it spun. The system booted with PC-DOS and carried the serene simplicity of IBM BASIC.

For the first time, I could speak to a machine without borrowing time from my father’s office. I wrote small programs: plotting sines, counting loops, printing names that appeared like echoes on the green monitor. Each FOR–NEXT loop was a whisper of infinity.

By 1989, I had installed TASM — Turbo Assembler. The syntax was more refined, the responses faster, the possibilities endless. It was no longer just about making the machine obey — it was about understanding the beauty of structure, timing, and how logic itself could form poetry.

Those three milestones — MASM 1981, BASIC 1984, and TASM 1989 — were not just steps in learning programming. They were the chapters of an awakening: from watching code, to writing it, to mastering its silence.

And as I look back now, every beep, every crash, every green pixel was not a failure — it was the machine teaching me patience, teaching me to listen.

Because before there was AI, there was Assembly.

And before there was syntax, there was wonder.

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Excel, Gauss–Seidel, and the Smell of Coal and Steam

Prologue: The Iterative Prayer
In the dim glow of a control room, numbers danced across the black screen. Mass flow, enthalpy, exergy — each variable whispering balance, demanding attention. I sat there with nothing but Excel, a Gauss–Seidel loop, and the hum of a boiler miles away. It wasn’t just math; it was communion with a machine that breathed in coal and exhaled light.

Chapter I: The Manual Gospel
CycleTempo ran its calculations like a cathedral organ, precise and grand. But I trusted my hands on the spreadsheet, cell by cell, iteration by iteration. Jacobi was the slow psalm, Gauss–Seidel the responsive litany. With every pass, the cycle whispered: “Are you balanced now? Does entropy rest?”

Chapter II: The Smell of Steam
Coal dust clung to the air outside the plant. The turbine screamed in metallic prayer. Inside the diagram, numbers shifted: 335.00 K here, 11,772 kW there. It wasn’t sterile. It smelled of ash, heat, and human intent — equations written in fire.

Chapter III: The Dialogue
Excel was no longer software; it was a slate. Gauss–Seidel was not an algorithm; it was a question asked over and over until the plant answered. Δh, ΔT, η — they became more than symbols. They became the language of a living cycle.

Epilogue: Between Coal and Code
Years later, I open the same diagram and still hear the hum. Not just the turbine, but the quiet conversation between man, machine, and math. In the end, every megawatt is a hymn. And every balanced cell is a small act of worship in the Church of Thermodynamics.