A Korean Developer's 1980s Journey: Tape Drives, Game Addiction, and Typed Code
A software developer recalls how a discontinued math competition in Busan, South Korea, was quietly converted into a computer class in 1985, giving him his first exposure to personal computers. He went on to represent Busan at a national computing contest in Seoul in 1986, where participants brought their own machines and sat four-hour exams. A Samsung computer he earned by qualifying for nationals became his gateway to cassette-loaded games and early programming. He developed patience and coding skills by manually typing source code from a computer magazine line by line. By middle school, floppy disks and role-playing games like Ultima had taken over, before exam pressures eventually steered him toward a formal computer science education in the 1990s.
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