Once upon a time, I was a little girl in the midst of a lot of crazy boys who loved gadgets and electronics. Having been the first among the lot to own an Amiga 500, I was accepted rather easily even though I was of the female persuasion. I wasn't kidding myself even then; I knew they were after my games, not my friendship. Still, I had a few close male friends and we hung out all the time.

At some point during our early teens, we became interested in other things related to computers, not just games. This was pretty much pre-internet, so don't say 'porn!' even though we all know that's the whole point of setting up a lot of personal computers in a network. No, we were interested in the demo scene, the programming, the graphics, the music. Actually, I am kidding myself. I still did that to get to the games. One of my closest friends and I started our own group. We were in awe of groups like Cryptoburners, Razor 1911, Anarchy, Crusaders, Absence etc., and had seen a lot of demos and intros that they and hundreds of others had made. I had my own little notebook with the addresses of a lot of them. We were going to blend in, no problem.

Naturally, we needed a cool name. Being quite inept when it came to English still, our best bet was to just make sure there were some X's or Z's thrown in for good measure. So we settled on Gritz as our group name. I honestly did not know what 'grits' meant back then, but we thought it looked cool. Also, it was pretty easy to spell using only straight lines, which was what we would need to do in our AWESOME demos.

My friend went a little overboard with the X-and-Z theory and named himself Azz. We DID know what 'ass' meant. Now, why on Io I called myself Leoban, I will never know.

So we were ready to take over the demo scene. All we needed was some programming skills and artistic talent. Unfortunately I couldn't do much, but at least 'Azz' was pretty good with a pencil (his school books were filled with drawings). Then we got to know 'the Animal' (his real name escapes me), who said he could teach me some coding. We were both very serious. I realised pretty quickly his method of teaching basically involved my learning long routines by heart without knowing what they meant. Luckily I am blessed with a very good memory for that sort of thing, but it meant my coding was, should we say limited?

Back at home the only way I could pick up things from there on, was to fiddle with programs others had made, tedious work involving changing one thing at a time, then assemble/compile and run to see what that had changed. Needless to say, I would never become a world class programmer that way, but let me tell you: I learnt a lot about computers! (I tried my hand at easier programming languages, too, like BASIC and my personal favourite AMOS (in which I even made a short game; great fun)).

Still, around this time I found that it was actually quite a lot of fun experimenting with Soundtracker, Noisetracker and, later, Protracker (and even OctaMED), where I could make horrible music only I liked listening to. I am not delusional; it's quite bad, most of it, but I discovered years later that I wasn't half bad as long as I had the right programs and, most of all, enough RAM and a decent sampler. Besides, even Jean Michel Jarre's first few albums are rather on the ridiculous side (yes, I keep reminding myself of that, so perhaps I am a bit delusional after all).

Gritz eventually fell apart, basically because we had absolutely nothing to show for ourselves, and because we used our meetings mostly to play computer games anyway. I started my own group after a while, which was even more pointless, as it consisted of only one member. Well, I'm lying. It had three members, but they were all me, really. I just thought it looked a bit pathetic if the same person covered all three main functions. Especially considering how bad I was at all three. At least this way the blame could be shared. Outwardly.

To be frank, I suppose that group never dissolved. Following the proper demo scene code, the group had both a 'Dr.' something and a 'Mr.' something. We specialised in making compilation disks (I was heavily addicted to DiskMaster and loved it when I finally figured out how to make my own startup menus), and I always put some new music on top of the text menus to show off my skills...I probably shouldn't have. I also specialised in ruining my own disks with the Saddam virus, but that's a tale for another day.

My Amiga was covered in post-it notes listing all the Protracker commands, and I was very prolific in my music-making; making a tune a day in periods. My parents probably thought I was doing more sinister things upstairs, but all I did was sitting hunched over my computer, fag in hand, hooked up to the stereo where I heard half the tune in one ear and a different half in the other. It was all great fun and it all sounded rather bad. I have always been hung up in rhythms, though, so I usually started out with the bass drum, snares and hi-hats, then built a song from there. If I weren't pleased with the rhythm, I threw the whole thing away. It also made me aware of tempos and most of all I became a fan of breakbeats.

Well, all good things apparently must come to an end, and I cut down on the music-making quite rapidly when I became a proud PC owner in '98. In 2005 my Amiga was discovered, presumed dead, as I was packing my stuff for The Big Move to the UK, and was quietly put to definite sleep by my dad. I didn't want to know. It took about two months before I wanted to find a new one on eBay, so I guess a part of me will always consider the Amiga to be the best part of my youth.

Labels: computers, personal