My First Computer

There is no question my life would have been very different if I hadn’t discovered personal computers.

My first interaction was in 1978 when a kid in my Social Studies class (the amazing Mr. Fries – pronounced Freeze) brought in his Dad’s computer.  It rolled in on a large AV cart.  It had a black and white ASCII monitor and 8″ floppies.  I don’t recall the brand.  My vague recollection is that it ran Spacewar which would have been would have been roughly 18 years after it was first released in 1962.

My second interaction with personal computers was in 1979, in the ninth grade.  My friend Ken, who I’ve known since Junior High, had one of the first personal computers, a TRS-80.  He was the first person I knew who owned a home computer.  Perhaps the first one in our school, but certainly the first in my circles.

I think I stalked him a bit and we became friends.  I’d feel guilty but we’re friends still, after 35 years or so, so hopefully he knows I wasn’t just using him for his computer.

The TRS-80 had graphics (of a sort) as well as an ASCII (text) screen in black and white.  Actually more of a black-ish and green-ish, but you get the idea.  Two colors.  That time coincided with the advent of some of the first Infocom text adventures.  Those games typically kicked my butt.  I could not figure out how to get the Babel Fish in to my ear in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.  When Ken was playing Deadline I recall him exploring a room and finding a pad of paper and me suggesting that he rub it with a pencil (like you see in the movies) and sure enough, there was a clue on it!  That sense of discovery that came with a bit more information, a bit more description from the game was heady.

The next year, in tenth grade, our High School had a computer lab that was getting ready to bring in new computers to replace the teletype computers they had as well as a used Commodore PET.  They were replacing those with Apple II computers, I think.  Whatever happened to those guys…

The Commodore Pet was an incredible machine to my eyes.  It was an integrated computer with the monitor mounted in a hard steel case above the CPU and integrated keyboard which had keys on a grid using little square keys that placed the Q directly above the A and below that the Z.  Not offset and pretty closely positioned together.  It messed up my typing on a regular keyboard for years.  The chassis even opened up so you could access the board housing the CPU, memory and other parts.  It had a bar to hold it open like the hood of a car.  This thing even had it’s own tape drive on which I could store programs!  It was contained It had 8K of memory, which meant roughly 8192 characters worth of information at one time.  That’s not much more than the length of this article.  So, not much in retrospect, but, it seemed like a world of opportunities was contained in that metal box.

I heard that they were getting rid of a perfectly good computer.  Unfortunately for me, they wanted the unheard of amount of $300 for the computer.  I was still 15 and not working yet, so I had no money and no real means to make money quickly and at that scale.  Historically, my Dad had made a deal with me: If I wanted something really badly, I had to come up with half of it and he’d match the other half.  He very reasonably wanted me to have some skin in the game.  It’s a policy I’d continue with my own kids.

But, in this case I didn’t have $150.  I think I had maybe $50.

I went home knowing I was going to ask but knowing the odds of the conversation going well were very low.  We never had a lot of extra money and me asking for $250 for a computer, which was not something my Dad needed or wanted or, probably, saw any value in, seemed like a really poor plan.

But, I asked.  I pitched that computer as the best deal possible.  I would care for it, learn from it and, of course, pay him back for all of my half if he could just, PLEASE, get me this computer.  And the time pressure!  It was only on sale for a couple of weeks as I recall.

Unsurprisingly, the answer was No.

In his defense, this was a pretty unreasonable request given our previous understanding of me having half the money.  Add on top of that I just showed up one day out of the blue asking for it with no warning and no planning and I should not have been, could not have been, surprised at the answer.  But, of course, I was devastated.

Days passed and I tried to scheme ways I could make the money.  I asked my Dad if there were jobs or chores I could do to make money.  But, there was nothing that I could come up with.

As the final day approached and I was getting ready to go to school, I made my last ditch plea.  I begged, asking if there was ANY way he could help me with this, I would appreciate it so much.

My Dad is not and was not perfect.  None of us are.  And he didn’t know a computer from a cash register.  But, he knew that this was important to me and he probably didn’t even know why it was important to me.

He wrote me a check for that computer.  I’d be willing to bet a bit of money that there was not even money in the account to back that check when he wrote it, but when the check was deposited, it cleared.  I got my computer!  It was MY computer.

It came with a few tapes from a monthly computer-based magazine called Cursor.  On these tapes came games and demos and applications.  Importantly to me, most were written in BASIC, the language that came with the Commodore PET.  By running those programs and looking at listings of the programs, I could learn programming.  And I did learn programming!  I absorbed every issue with the intensity that only an obsessed teenager is capable.

I certainly didn’t know how to talk with girls, but I knew how to talk to that computer!

And, the best part for a 15-year old looking for *something* that he could control in his life, that computer would do EXACTLY what I told it to do, whether it was right or wrong, it did it.

Now, that computer did have issues.  I mentioned the chassis that lifted so you could access the board inside.  Dropping from the underside of the monitor was a large bundle of wires that socketed on the board for the video.  Turns out the Commodore PET was a bit notorious for having a flakey connection to the video.  This occasionally necessitated me lifting the hood and re-seating the video connector solidly to improve the connection and then having to reboot (turn it off and on again).

Looking back, I wish I had been able to hold on to that computer.  I spent most of the next three years with it, learning its ins and outs.  But, in the end, I was swayed by the latest home computer from Commodore, the VIC-20 because it had COLOR!

I ended up selling the Commodore PET for the same $300 I was able to buy it for (with my Dad’s help – Thanks Dad!).

In all likelihood I would have ended up on this career path anyway, but there’s no question that having access to my own computer at home to obsess over started me on the path that I remain on to this day.

It goes without saying that my Dad believing in me and taking a chance on me and loosening our agreement and helping me get that computer made an immense impression on me.  I appreciate it to this day!