Welcome to Pete's QBASIC Site!


About Pete

Me in a crappy movie I made in high school. From Oh Cany Productions. I was the cohost of a redneck hunting show.

This is me last year in my Hanson-decorated dorm room. Yeah, I grew a beard. And yeah, the Hanson posters are a joke.

Me in another crappy high school movie. This one was about a loaf of bread taking over the world. I was the detective.
  • Full Name: Peter Robert Berg
  • Age: 18
  • Birthday: July 26, 1985
  • Hometown: Candor, NY
    (Basically Cow town, USA. Population: less than 1000. Restaurants in town: One. Stoplights: None.)
  • High School: Owego Free Academy in Owego, NY
    (A medium-sized high school. My class had 215 people in it. I graduated as the Saluditorian of the Class of 2003 in June, 2003.)
  • College: Ithaca College in Ithaca, NY
    (A great college for Music, Theatre and Communications. I love it at IC. Also, they gave me a the Park Scholarship--all tuition and living expenses paid in full. So yeah, I really like Ithaca College a lot!)
  • Major: Television-Radio
    (I'm also looking into doing a second major in Cinema & Photography if the dean will let it fly.)
  • Current Year: Sophomore.
    I just finished my Freshman year, and I'm heading back in August '04 for my second year.
  • Hobbies:
    • Filmmaking - That's what I'm going to college for.
    • Boy Scouts - I got Eagle Scout in 2003. Now I'm an Assistant Scoutmaster for my old troop.
    • Television - At college, I work on the crew for four different TV shows, which are broadcast weekly on public access.
    • Documentaries - I love to watch documentaries, and I am currently working on a documentary on Hate Radio which I started in my Spring 2003 semester. In the future, I'd like to be a documentary filmmaker.
    • Web Design - I've always loved creating websites. Check out some of my other sites:
    • 60's Music - It's amazing how much great music was made in that one decade. I especially like British Invasion stuff.
    • The Nonmortals - My cult. 'Nuff said.
    • Creek Walking - You know, it's amazing how often I find myself walking down creeks. I also like canoeing and camping.
    • Indie Films - Yeah, I'm one of those snobby indie film types. I watch them all the time. Bite me.
    • Reality TV - My favorite genre of television. I can't get enough of Survivor, The Mole, The Amazing Race, The Apprentice, Eco-Challenge, etc. One day I hope to produce my own reality show for my college TV station.
    • Dwarf Tossing - No joke. I have never tried it, but I have done two major research projects on dwarf tossing so far. One day, I hope to make a documentary about this drunken bar sport.
    • Organizing Stuff - I'm like OCD about keeping my stuff organized, and I never throw anything away.
    • Dressing up in Costumes - I won second place at a Halloween Costume contest last year. Boo yeah! I also went to highschool dressed in a kilt, and to various movie premieres dressed up as characters...with a group of friends, and it wasn't my idea...but it sure was fun.
    • Dead Baby Jokes - The funniest thing to come along since the Holocaust. Um....*ahem*
    • Rapper's Delight - That pioneer rap song by the Sugar Hill Gang. I'm in the process of memorizing the fourteen-and-a-half minute version of it.
    • Improv Comedy - Not that I'm any good at it.


Why I Remade Pete's QBASIC Site

Howdy, I'm Pete Berg. I'm the captain of this here ship. Back when I was age eleven through fourteen, I loved QBASIC. I lived and breathed QBASIC. That's why I started Pete's QBASIC Site. I updated it every day from two months after my thirteenth birthday until two months before my fifteenth birthday. I built it into a really great site, and it was the first major QBASIC Reviews site on the internet. But all the work finally got to me, and I quit. Pete's QB Site really was just a middle school project of mine that kind of got a life of its own. But it was quite an accomplishment, nonetheless.

So here I am now, redoing my site. I'm eighteen now, and I haven't touched QBASIC in years. I guess you could say it was a faze I went through. I'm still interested in game-making, for sure, but I haven't actually done any game programming since I was a wee lad. The truth is, I was always more interested in the online QBASIC community. I really enjoyed QBASIC when I was younger, but it was mostly because of the community of QB programmers I met and interacted with over the years. I was never a good QB programmer, but I have always been a pretty good communicator, so instead of contributing awesome games and programs to the QB community, I contributed the best way I knew how--by managing my site. That's what it was really all about, now that I think about it. I liked helping the other programmers in the QB Community learn and interact, despite the fact that I didn't do much programming of my own.

Coming back to the QB community after years, I realize how great a thing we've got going here. And now that I look around, I see that the QB web community is shrinking. It's much less active than it used to be. Sure, the programs now are a whole lot better than they used to be, but it seems like there's something missing. I see all the broken links, the sites that have disappeared, the once bustling QB message boards that have become 404 Error pages...it's really disheartening. Seeing QBASIC disappear from the Internet would bother me quite a bit, even if I don't have the time to be a regular contributor anymore. So I decided to do what little I could to keep QB thriving online. That meant redoing my site.

I really want to see QBASIC continue to flourish online for years to come. That's why I'm redoing my site. It's the least I can do, for all the great times I've had as a result of QB--everything I've learned and the friends I've made.

-Pete, June 17, 2004


The Story of Pete and QB

I've been programming in QB since I was eleven. I started back in late '96 and casually started programming on a crappy 386 "portable" computer our family had. (By "portable," I mean the size of a suitcase. It had a fold-down detachable keyboard and a 10-inch monochrome screen, which for some reason was in black and red instead of black and white.) But it had QBASIC on it, and I just loved the idea of making my own computer games. My first ever programming experience came when I read the book Inventing Your Own Computer Games by Fred D'Ignazzio. All I really remember about that book was that it had an orange cover and in all the sample programs, the user was always named "Marvin." But I loved copying the programs from the book and experimenting with my own little games. My first QBASIC project was a text adventure called AREA 51, which I never finished. I only knew a handful of commands, and it was made up of spaghetti code, but it was a great experience. I was playing a game I had made myself! I was amazed.

In middle school, we had a very basic computer class, where we learned the basics of programming in--you guessed it--QBASIC. Before I started the ten-week class, I already knew quite a bit of QBASIC (more than we learned in the entirety of the course, that's for sure)! In fact, we didn't even learn basic graphics commands in that course. The final project was to make a game using text graphics. In a few minutes, I made my game, called TOWER, which ended up being the best game in the class. Judging by how much that game sucks, you can tell how basic this BASIC course was (hah!). Everyone in the class loved TOWER, though. I made copies for other kids, and they played it all period long....kind of sad, but whatever. They liked it.

While I was "learning" QBASIC in school, my family got an Internet connection on our 150 MHZ Packard Bell PC with 16MB of RAM. (That was the same computer I used for all my programming and for making my websites until August of 2001 when I finally got my own computer...Wow.) So anyway, I got online and did a search for QBASIC. I found QBasic.com, the QBasic Top 50, NeoZones Productions, Future Software and a whole bunch of other sites that are probably all dead by now. QBASIC shareware programs became like digital crack to me, and I would scour the web to try out every game, graphics example, utility, etc. that I could find in QBASIC. In the meantime, I learned more advanced QB programming techniques, such as how to make a SPRITES and a TILE ENGINE!

I also joined the QB Community. I became a regular poster at the NeoZones Productions Qboard. A little too regular, perhaps. I replied to almost every single message ever posted for a few months. I remember once Glenn (anyone remember him?) made fun of me for posting so much. I also became a contributor to some of my favorite QB sites, submitting content for webmasters to add...I never really wrote any good programs or tutorials or anything back then, but I did submit other people's stuff to websites on their behalf.

Finally, October of 1998 rolled around, when on a whim I decided to start my own QBasic site. I was barely thirteen at the time, and didn't know the first thing about web design. But that didn't stop me. I registered for a free account at FreeYellow.com and started a crappy little site with probably the worst layout ever made. Here's a copy of my site from its first week, if you're wondering...and then there was the original about me section from back then. I also had a Projects section where I put up information about an RPG I was programming. It never came into fruition, though, because I was always too busy with the site. In fact, I have never released any finished QB games in my entire history other than TOWER.BAS. I've always spent the time I wanted to spend programming working on my site, which I guess was both a good and bad thing. (What would have been better--another QB RPG or this big QB Mecca that you're visiting? I dunno.)

Anyway, I was diligent. I was always a busy bee, and I kept working on the site through thick and thin. I updated it every single day (with a handful of exceptions for reasons outside of my control) for over a year and a half. Before I knew it, I was running one of the top QB sites on the 'net. Check out the History Section for more about Pete's QB Site's history.

In April of 2000, I got burnt out and quit updating my site and just left the QB community behind without even saying good-bye. I guess it was because I couldn't bring myself to admit that I was quitting the QB Scene (I didn't want to let go), but also because I really was not at all interested in QBASIC at all anymore. So I just snuck away one night...and never looked back.

So finally December 2003 comes around and I'm a Freshman in college. I hadn't updated this site since I was a Freshman in highschool. But I got interested in web programming again, and designed a few sites. Then one day I took a trip down memory lane and looked at Pete's QB Site. Again, on a whim, I decided to remake the site. So I did...halfway. Then I quit again, until I returned in June of 2004 and finished the task. Now Pete's QB Site is back and better than ever. Yeeeeeeah!


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All rights reserved. Site owned and operated by Pete Berg. Programs and submitted content are property of their creators, and appear on this site by direct or implied permission. Pete's QBasic Site is powered by Coranto. This site was created entirely in Notepad.