Bio Info: Mike Jordan Author of M & S Software Doors BBS: Com-Dat BBS 6 line Wildcat! BBS running on Novell Lite. Fido: 1:105/314 and 1:105/317 Main Call-in Numbers: Node 1: (503)681-0543 Node 2: (503)640-0278 Node 3: (503)681-8324 email: mjordan@europa.com ============================================================= "Hi, my name is Mike Jordan, and yes, I'm a door author." Door author. When you hear that title, what does it bring to mind? What type of person do you see? Since most of you reading Door World Magazine are either Sysops, BBS callers, or door authors yourself, you probably have a pretty good idea of what a door author is. Or do you? Do you see a door author as a pudgy faced kid with black plastic, coke bottled sized glasses? Or do you see someone kicked back in his patent leather office chair, with a keyboard in his lap, occasionally poking in some code on the next WhizBangToDieFor door release? If you were to ask twenty people to describe a door author, you would probably get close to 20 different descriptions. I've not met very many door authors in person but I have talked to a lot by phone and messages and for the most part, I've found door authors to be your average type person, indistinguishable from anyone else...well, except maybe they squint a little more from looking into the monitor so much. And then there is this one group between the ages of 14 and 16 that make programming doors seem so easy, it almost makes me want to find another hobby. Luckily most of the younger ones discover girls and are no longer a worry for several years. So yes, I'm one of "those" door authors. I don't consider myself an outstanding programmer, but I'm not half bad either. I'm not a fast programmer, it usually takes me a month to do what some programmers can whip out in a few days to a week...but then I know some authors that only come out with a new door once every 7 years (and they still have 5 years to go . Being asked to write for Door World Magazine was a surprise. After all, there are a lot of really good programmers out there and a few really great ones that would have jumped at the chance for all this fame and glory. Of course, I don't know how many turned them down before they got to me . You are probably wondering what direction my writing is going to take and what wondrous enlightenment I'll shed on doors. Well, let me be up front and say, I don't know. Not yet anyway. I know what I like in a door and what I don't. I'll talk about that, as well as ideas for doors, my opinion of what makes a good door, suggestions for sysops and other door authors, and just about anything else I can think about, in upcoming columns. I'll even talk about my doors every chance I get . Just keep in mind that any opinions I express are mine and may not necessarily be the same ones held by the other writers and editors of Door World magazine or of the general public. I would like to receive feedback along the way, so if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions that concerns doors, or what I'm writing about, please let me know. Door World is so new I'm not sure where they will put it, but somewhere around my column should be my Fido and email addresses where you can drop me a note. I'll also post it at the end, just in case the editor it so busy she forgets . It seems that the traditional thing to do with a new column is give some background information about oneself. And who am I to buck tradition ? Besides, the editor is waiting with her red pen, so I'd better get this show on the road. My first experience with a computer was a binary calculator my dad built back in the early '60s. I didn't know it was a computer at the time but it was a lot of fun to play with. The wooden box my dad put it in had a rotary phone dial and 8 lights across the top. When you dialed a number the lights would flash back and forth as the rotor unwound. It wasn't until many years later that I realized that the game my dad taught us kids to play of trying to get certain lights to light up, was teaching us to count in binary. Dial 1 and the first light lit, 2 and the second light lit, 3 and the first and second light lit, and so on. I wasn't very good at it and mostly just dialed in random until the right combination of lights lit. But even though I didn't realize it at the time it was my first taste of high tech. My first real computer (yes, there were real computers before Windows ) was an Apple II+ that I bought in 1980. It had a whopping 48k of memory, no hard drive, no floppy (I couldn't afford it so opted for the cassette recorder interface) and I used a 13 inch black and white tv for a monitor (occasionally I borrowed our 19 inch color tv). It was great even if it did cost $1400.00 (and the talking I had to do to convince my wife that it was a necessity on our military pay is a story in itself). I learned a lot with that computer. Almost everything I ran on it I had to type in...which was about everything I could get my hands. From magazines, printouts, and books, to scribbled code that I came up with during idle time at work. If it was code, I typed it in. Along the way I learned a lot about debugging code as well as programming structure. I eventually got a floppy drive (hard drives were still unheard of), a printer and a better monitor but I still typed in a lot of my own programs from magazines. This was a time when everyone shared code with one another and there were many good magazines available to teach the in and outs of computing. I played around with the Apple for a couple of years learning to program in AppleSoft (Apple's version of basic) and generally learning everything I could. One day I was working on a biorhythm program that I had typed in from "Nibble Magazine", adding a few bells and whistles that I thought it needed. I sent this enhanced version into "Nibble" thinking they might post it in the feedback column they ran but not really expecting anything other than maybe a rejection letter. To my surprise, they not only accepted it but paid me $80 to boot. I was ecstatic! This was my first taste of getting paid for doing something that was not only easy but fun as well. My next program, a game, was rejected. Not that it wasn't good, but they already had several of that type game in their collection of future articles and another one wasn't needed. I survived the rejection and went on to do other things, a few more games, but mostly programs that I could use in my job to impress my boss and co-workers. I purchased my first PC more by accident than design in 1988. The brother of a good friend of mine had to leave the country in a hurry (literally) and needed some quick cash. He had just set up Com-Dat BBS on a 286/12 with 3 megs of ram (one meg on the motherboard and 2 megs on a AST Rampage card), 120 megs of hard drive space, EGA monitor, a 2400 baud Courier modem with MNP 3, and a bunch of other stuff. He was running Wildcat! 1.12 and SEAdog (SEAdog was a popular Fido mailer at the time). It was such a good price that I couldn't pass it up and he assured me that he would be around to help me learn to run the BBS. So after only two days of generalized training he heads for the Virgin Islands, leaving me with a BBS I barely know how to run and a hand full of scribbled notes. It was frustrating, it was fun, it was exasperating and it was exciting, all rolled into one. It only took me about 6 months before I was pretty comfortable with the setup and had a good stable BBS. Along with all the BBS and Fido mail software that came with the computer, he had over 80 door games installed. Some were good but a lot stunk. However, it was more doors than most boards in the area had so I left them all up. Playing around with the doors and seeing how poorly some were written I got to thinking (as many have) that I could do something better than that. So I purchased QuickBasic 4.5 and had a go at it. And hit a brick wall. I could program games, yes, but there was no information on programming doors. I tried asking in the Fido echos, I tried finding sample code that I could look at, I tried asking door authors but all I got was bits and pieces of the puzzle. I was just about ready to give up when I registered a door from a guy in West Virginia (and those that have talked voice with him know just how West Virginian he sounds ). The door was called In-Between and the author was Rusty Johnson. It was that registration that opened up all the, (uh, pardon the pun ;D) doors for programming door games. Rusty and I struck up a friendship that we still have today. He was not only willing to talk with me about doors, he also gave me the source to a working door so I could see how it was done. That and a few mega-hours of explanations was all I needed. I put my first door, "Coin-Toss", out in 1989. It was freeware and I actually received a couple of messages from sysops that ran it. Those messages stick with me even more than the first registration I received almost two years later when I put out my first real door, "Booby Trap". Besides "Booby Trap", I've also released "Peg-Jump", "Knight's Move", "Hot-Dice", "Chuck-A-Luck", "Poker Bandit", "Tri-Bingo", "Video Bandit" and "Jewel Thief". Currently I'm stretching myself thin by working on 2 new doors as well as upgrading my current ones to include InterBBS play. I'm also working on a complete re-write of the old Scott Baker door, Galactic Warzone. The re-write is going a lot slower than I'd like, partly because it's totally new ground for me (something I'll get into in future articles) and partly because I have so many other projects going on at the same time (such as taking on the Western Region distribution/registration of RAR, a new archive/compression program and NU which is a Nodelist Updater, both coming out of Europe and about to hit the US in a big way). Yet with everything I have going on I'm still having fun and if you can't get rich you might as well have fun, right? Well, ok, so I wouldn't mind being a little more rich and having a little less fun . And that brings me to the end of my first, of what I hope is going to be many columns in Door World magazine. Like I said above, if you feel like dropping me a note, feel free to. Just don't ask me how to create a door . I can be reached at Fido: 1:105/317 or 1:105/314 and by email at mjordan@europa.com. Until next month. ÿ