Before I studied computer science, there was a contest in Busan, a cassette that loaded games, and code I typed in from a magazine.
A look back — long before any of the tools we argue about now.
These episodes come from studying computer science in Korea in the 1990s. But the memory starts a few years earlier, with a handful of words from the 1980s.
A personal-computer contest
In 1985, my elementary school in Busan ran an after-school class to pick kids for a math competition. That year the regional district math contest happened to be discontinued, so the class was quietly converted into a computer class instead — and that's how I first met a personal computer, and the idea of a contest built around one. It was probably an early ancestor of today's programming olympiads. I got lucky: in 1986 I went up to Seoul for the first time, to a place called Jamsil, as one of Busan's representatives. Picture a large hall where each kid hauls in their own computer and sits an exam for four hours, a little like candidates at an old civil-service examination. To get there you had to win your way through the district round, then the Busan city round.
