Me and the Computer - 1

12:57 AM, after making many revisions, I'm about to finish. Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I distributed a website I created in a package format that others can use. Today, I also did an update patch. It's just amazing that everything works normally. If it weren't for the AI agent, it would have taken me years to study and do things that I could do in just a few days.

It feels like just yesterday that I first met Chat GPT in 2022, installed Stable Diffusion on my PC to create images with local AI, and created and tested simple shooting games, music players, certificate generators, and web-based 3D shooting games with Perplexity and Chat GPT. This experience of creating something visible from what I thought of gives me a thrill close to the joy I experienced when I was in the 4th grade of elementary school, that is, when I was 10 years old, when I printed out the calculation details I wrote on the computer with a dot printer. Isn't it a blessing to be able to have new experiences in my mid-forties?

Fortunately, I was really lucky to experience computers very early. At that time in Korea, only wealthy families, not just rich but upper class, could access computers. The price of one computer was more expensive than a car and equivalent to the Jeonse price in a provincial city. I was 10 years old at the time and went to school in Geoje Island, South Korea. Geoje Island is a very, very, very rural area in Korea and even an island. In such a remote area, in a school with just over 50 students, my teacher traveled around four villages for several months to persuade parents to raise money and buy not just one but five computers. And they installed it in the school. Four units were installed in the back of the classroom, and one unit was installed in a small empty classroom.

The teacher first allowed students to use the computer freely. Looking back now, I don't think the teacher knew how to use the computer well either. Apart from the basic typing game, shooting game, and word processor, there was almost nothing else you could do with that expensive computer. The students were enthusiastic about shooting games for a few days. When it was my turn, I played typing games. Other friends looked at me strangely, but I found it more fun. This is because I intuitively knew that I could use the word processor if I played the typing game. It was so amazing that what I typed on the keyboard was displayed on the screen in neat letters. Even that gradually became boring, so after that, I pressed this and that in the input window that I didn't even know what it was. I felt like I could do something new, like it was hidden, but I couldn't figure it out at all. The teacher saw me and designated another friend to teach me the computer. That friend was competing with me for first and second place in the entire school (out of 50 students).

After class, that friend and I learned from the teacher what we could do with a computer. The teacher was also learning and teaching haltingly, so the progress of the three of us was very slow. I remember the moment when I first ran a calculator with 8 digits. I remember the moment when I ran Lotus 123, which the teacher had bought at a great cost, and even printed out the contents entered on the sheet with a dot printer and cheered together. It seems to have taken almost a year to get to that point. In the meantime, I moved to the city, and from then on, my computer studies were cut off. Only after entering middle school did I become friends with a wealthy student in the same class who didn't have many friends, and I was able to access computers again. I went to that friend's house as if it were my own, and my friend and I were engrossed in computers. They were mostly games, but they may seem foolish, but they were all precious experiences and lessons for me. This is because, at that time, it was quite difficult to run even one game, and you couldn't do it unless you studied this and that.

Continued in the next article.
Me and the Computer - 2

#Web Development #AI Utilization #Development Log #Developer #Artificial Intelligence #Automation #IT Technology #Coding #Programming #Generative AI