... similarities I found between me and John Carmack ...
We both experimented with burglary as teenagers (he was caught; I wasn't).
That's a curious phrasing - echos of 'experimented with drugs' or 'experimented with my sexuality': positive, life-affirming actions, discovering your true self.
I would steal games from stores, take them home, copy them (using this ridiculously clunky 1x IDE cd copier that had to be mounted outside the computer in a frame and held up by elastic bands, to get a decent yield), and return them.
I got caught, funny enough when returning a disc rather than stealing it.
This turned into my first job as the guy agreed to not make a big deal out of is if I used my Ape50 to do deliveries for him after school for a bit. After the bit ended, we decided we got along, so I kept working there afternoons until I graduated, and two years fulltime after graduation.
Then the place closed because a Euronics opened two streets over, and I moved to the US for university.
It's neat that you still have it, though. Pretty much everything of mine from around then has long since vanished.
(though apparently a few utility programs I wrote for class were still being passed around after I graduated. I sometimes wonder how long that lasted, though by now they've no doubt disappeared as well)
On a similar note I've found Ben 'Yahtzee / ZeroPunctuation' Crowshaw's "Ego Review" series pretty fascinating, where his friend replays the games he made when he was a kid, and they commentate over it.
The very few I made myself in gwbasic died with the double side floppy disks (720KB!) were I had them stored. At some point at the end of the 90s I tried to recover them, but it was already too late.
It's a shame. Not that they were good games in anyway, but that's how nostalgia works :)
I remember having to buy a Ti 83 calculator for ninth grade math, and all we used them for was programming text adventures. I'm waiting for the indie game dev community to pick up on the trend of Ti 83 revivals!
So much Ultima influence! Some of those tiles look, er, very familiar :)
I wonder if Carmack ever dreamed that in 20 years he'd be building rockets and the author of Ultima would have traveled to space. (Incidentally, in Ultima II, you could travel into space!)
Does one discover one's inner burglar?