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My first contact with computers was in the year 1991 when I got an Amiga 500 as a birthday present from my grandma. From this time I'm a kind of addicted to these machines. After a short and intensive period of gaming I started programming. The first programming language I got in touch with was GFA-BASIC (Waschmaschinen-Basic). Together with a friend I tried to write demos like Red Sectors Megademo or Rebels Megablast but we ran into serious performance problems. So we started to code the beautiful MC68000 in assembly language.
Later on I wrote some Pascal and C programs to learn an alternative high-level language to GFA-BASIC. At this time I bought my brand new A1200. This was an amazing machine. It had a clock rate of 14MHz because of a very fast MC68020(EC) processor, 2 MB of chip RAM and a hard disk. On this machine everything was possible. I wrote a lot of machine code on it. Mainly funny optical effects like (sine) scrollers and many blitter and copper torturing stuff. A friend taught me by Email some Prolog, SML, Perl and Lisp. Running these interpreters was also possible on this machine.
In 1995 I was forced to buy an used 486DX/2 with M$ Windows because I started my study at the university. Very unhappy with it I tried to install and maintain FreeBSD and failed. So I got to get along with Windows95 (tm). During this period I wrote (I was young and needed the money!) a few Visual Basic and MSVC/C++ programs. After this dark period (and several hardware upgrades, of course) I installed Slackware on my machine. This time I succeeded and saw the light at the end of the Micro$oft jungle. Today I'm using Debian - which I suppose to be the best Linux distro - together with the Unix Amiga Emulator which made my Amiga fever celebrate renaissance.
In those glory days of the Amiga, friends of mine and I started, inspired by such heros like Red Sector, Sanity, Quartex, Fairlight and so on, to create intros/demos. To be more exactly: ONE intro and ONE demo! We planned to become very famous in the demo scene. We called ourself "The Intruders". We thought that would be a really cool name. But unfortunately we did not have contact to only one person out of the demo scene. I don't believe someone outside of our home town ever saw what we created. Our first masterpiece was our intro. After weeks of hard work we were finally done. We distributed it among our classmates and became local celebrities of our school in the tender age of 16. A few months later a "day of the open door" was planned for our high school. Everybody should prepare something. Among other things there was the opportunity to exhibit programs written by ourself. To avoid acting in a silly play of our theatre group (that was one of the unsatisfying alternatives to showing self written computer programs) we started modifying our unfinished (and later never released) demo. After a few days and nights of pure coding we kept the deadline. For this demo we created our own operating system: The Intruders Operating System (IOS). It featured a simple memory management and file system and a very primitive interrupt handling. Today, I decided to put the results of our work here, so everybody all over the world can see them. Maybe we are getting famous now. Better late than never. ;-)
To improve this page optically I've included some screenshots of the above intro and demo. I took them from the UAE running both (the intro and the demo) on a X-window, so don't wonder about the resolution. Intro and demo run both in good old 320x256 pixel at the maximum of 32 colors (modulo copper manipulation ;-) ).
| The Intruders Intro: | |
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| loading screen | main screen | reset screen | |||
| The Intruders Demo: | |
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| the loading screen | our funky sine scroller | shade bobs (ripped) | fractal (ripped) | interference circles |
But that's not all! Among seeing other funny effects you can listen to more or less enjoyable music, when watching the intro/demo.
