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.