One of the greatest things to have ever happened to me was
my parents introducing me to my first childhood friend, a
computer made by Compudyne. We had a blast together. It's
Intel 486 CPU souped up with a DX attachment and an awesome
VESA complaint graphics card made playing life-like games
like Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, and Doom a blast:
[ this
certainly brings back memories ]
Its 100 MB hard drive and 4MB of RAM
ensured that even the most complex applications could be run
easily. Even though she was high maintenance, I enjoyed
having her around. Over the years, she was reincarnated by a
series of IBM and Dell machines.
For me, computers were great because I could bring to
life a lot of my random hobbies through a series of 3rd
party applications without ever having to leave the chair.
Speaking of random hobbies, I really enjoy drawing and sketching.
While what I normally draw would be on static pieces on
paper, I discovered two amazing applications on the computer
that allowed me to go one step farther and animate what I
drew. Those two applications were
Microsoft's Liquid Motion and
Macromedia's (now Adobe) Flash.
This was around 1998 - the world was different back then.
Being able to go from things displayed statically to things
that moved without writing code completely blew my brain.
That was the first time my brain exploded. A few years
later, discovering ActionScript and making things move
interactively blew my brain again. My brain
never has quite recovered since then.
kirupa.com Dabbling with
Flash and Liquid Motion and showing your parents what you
did is cool, but it is more fun to share it with other
people...like, your friends from school. To help make
sharing possible, I learned
about this thing called GeoCities that was giving everyone 8
MB of space for free!
The URL was originally something like geocities.com/SiliconValley/Grid/7341/index.htm,
but I paid a few dollars to later change it to geocities.com/~explorer98.
On the 10th of February in 1999,
after arguing with my mom about why the domain name should
be explorer98.com, I ended up registering kirupa.com
instead. Users who typed that into their address, and why
wouldn't they - it is such a common name that just rolls off
the tongue, were redirected to the GeoCities URL that you
saw earlier.
Anyway, it is at this location where I first posted my
animations and wrote tips and tricks on various computer
issues that my high maintenance computer put me through. As
I posted more of my Flash animations to the site (Liquid
Motion had been discontinued by now), people began to ask
how I created them. I wrote my responses online in tutorial
form, and they made up the first batch of Flash tutorials on
the site - tutorials whose spoiled great grandchildren you
see today.
One of the best things that ever came out of the site is
the
forums and the people I met through them. At around
2000/2001, the amount of questions I received far
outstripped my ability to respond to them. Fortunately,
online forums were starting to get mainstream, and they
provided a great way to interact with visitors, answer
questions, and have the answers archived for future
generations. At that time, the forums even had their own domain name:
kirupaforum.com. This
domain name is no longer used today, but if you try visiting
it, it
will redirect you to the current forums - just like that
domain has done since 2002.
Today, the site continues dishing out tutorials with a
peppering of snarky humor and pop culture references just
like it did when it was
started in 1999. While many things stayed the same, some
things changed. There are a lot
more well-wishers per month than there were when the audience was just
me and a handful of friends. This is no longer a solo
operation. There is an
awesome group of people who volunteer their time to help
keep everything running smoothly.
