As I can best recall, 1995-1997 was around the time I was introduced to the internet, the web, internet relay chat, etc, etc, etc. Prior to this, my brother and I had been avid Bulletin Board System (BBS) users. I had always wanted to run my own BBS, but being a kid, I just couldn’t afford myself the opportunity. So, when we first got dial up internet access via flash.net in Houston, TX, I quickly discovered the web, and began wondering how I could make my own website. Doing some of my own research via early search engines like AltaVista, and WebCrawler, I discovered a nice little tool called HotMetaL. It was with this tool that I put together my very first website, “SoftShoe Programmer’s World.”
Now, this was in the age of free website services such as Geocities, Xoom, etc. I quickly setup shop at http://www.geocities.com/TimeSquare/Arcade/6361 and proceeded to make the best use out of the one free megabyte I’d been allocated. Since generic QBasic programs are incredibly small, it was pretty easy to have a small bit of content up at all times. In between playing Doom and salivating over the upcoming release of Duke Nukem 3d, I’d be working on my website. In fact, my friend Pete and I decided to be super nerds and compete about who had the best website.
Unfortunately, my original website has been forever lost. I do have a fairly vivid memory of it though. It featured black square buttons I’d drawn in paintbrush with red text for their labels. You could navigate between a few pages of information by clicking these buttons. Fortunately, I do happen to have backup copies of pretty much every website I made after that. This includes various updates to “SoftShoe Programmer’s World” among other creations. Most of these websites are in a pretty decrepit state, as their image tags relied on absolute addresses of things actually stored on Geocities. Other tags rely on images provided by services that disappeared well over ten years ago. Nevertheless, I’ve fixed one up and have taken a few screenshots of it for your amusement. 🙂
The Landing Page
Qbasic Game Downloads
Links to other Qbasic Websites
This site also features a nice little biography written by the 15 year old version of me. I’ll be turning 29 next week, so that means I wrote this about 14 years ago. I’ll be wrapping up this post by leaving you with those words… 🙂
“Well first of all my name is Robert Shoemate, and I am 15 years old in the 9th grade. I have been programming for about two years. The first programming language I ever used was the simple Basic language on the Commodore 64. My Brother taught me some of the simple commands, and I thought it was pretty cool! The first program I ever made was a simple multiplication program. The second programming language I used was one called Amos. It was made for the Commodore Amiga and it was one of the coolest programming languages I have seen. I wasn’t that good at programming in this language because I was a little kid and I didn’t want to read the manual or anything. When I got my Packard Bell Pentium 75 in 7th grade I started expirementing with Qbasic. I started out making small simple programs with just text and no graphics. Then one day me and my best friend Jamy Ryals started to make a game called Lamb Hunt. This was my very first game that I ever used graphics with. I dont remember what grade I was in when I made this game, but I think I was in the beginning of the 8th grade. One day in 8th grade when one of my classes went to the computer lab I went into Qbasic and programmed a simple chat program for the networked computers. The teacher did’t like this program very much, but everyone I knew thought it was a cool program! After using Qbasic a while I was introduced to the language Visual Basic. This language was a lot like Qbasic except it was written to run in windows and it was a more flexible programming language. I havn’t really written anything good in this language, besides an extremely crappy version of Lamb Hunt 1 for Windows. Finally I was introduced to Visual C++. I am currently learning C++ it is one of the hardest to use languages I have seen, but its the best language out there, and ill be able to make awesome programs with it after I learn it. The SoftShoe name you see on this page a lot was made up by my Dad. He used our last name “Shoemate” and turned it into a cool sounding software company name…”
Robert's Programming Blog 