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I first got into gaming at the age of 8 when my parents bought me a Commodore-64 with 2 games, Lode Runner and Beach Head. These 2 games quickly became perhaps 50+ games thanks to a local geek group I hung out with.

But just playing the games wasn’t quite enough. I had a desire to really know what was happening behind the scenes in these games. I soon found myself learning Commodore 64’s Basic language and memorizing cryptic codes like ’sys 64738′. I would spend hours typing in thousands of numbers from a magazine called COMPUTE!’s Gazette between 0 and 255 into a MLX editor program, and if you made one mistake the resulting game or program would refuse to run!

This was back before we all knew the pitfalls of the keyword GOTO and I wrote a lot of Spaghetti code back then.

During my teenage years I spent quite a bit of time chatting with friends online at the local BBS, and even ran one myself for a while using Major BBS software. During this time I wrote a few software packages that ran under the MBBS platform, while getting some real exposure to the C language.

In the coming years I got into writing tools for DOS, Several macros for Excel and Access for a group at Boeing. I also got my first real taste of HTML and designing web sites there. From there I worked at Microsoft and Infospace doing a lot more web design. During this time I picked up what is now currently my favorite language, C#.

Now my wife and I are on a permanent vacation in Laos. We have all day to enjoy watching our little boy grow up. There is plenty time to study programming and enjoy the countryside.. life is good

-Matthew Benedict