Mona Lisa in Basic

I remember one night, when I was introduced to the whore called technology...or the lack of it. My brother, who is six years older than I am, came home with an amazing magazine, "Sizin Amstrad", which means "Your Amstrad" in Turkish. In the last few pages of every issue, there was a basic code to digitize a picture. Here is an example:

For those lucky and young ones, who don`t know basic programming, it looks like this:

It was a time when graphics were seldom on a computer screen. So my brother decided to type down the codes for a mona lisa photo. Well kind of...look at Sylvester Stallone`s and imagine him as mona lisa. It had hundreds and hundreds lines of typing odd symbols and numbers (see above). He finished after working 3 days.

When he finished he was shouting, cheering, calling us to his room. I ran (I was like 8, you know, always ready) and looked at it for like 5 minutes. Amazing. Proud of his hard work, he jumped to call my mom; his foot touched the power cable, snapped the poorly attached plug from the electricity outlet and the screen went black. Well maybe you don`t know, but saving was not invented back then.

He went into shock. Since then he is an odd person. Barely walks, rarely talks. Technology is a whore. Or the lack of it.