There is no question my life would have been very different if I hadn’t discovered personal computers.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 It rolled in on a large AV cart.\u00a0 It had a black and white ASCII monitor and 8″ floppies.\u00a0 I don’t recall the brand.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
My second interaction with personal computers was in 1979, in the ninth grade.\u00a0 My friend Ken, who I’ve known since Junior High, had one of the first personal computers, a TRS-80.\u00a0 He was the first person I knew who owned a home computer.\u00a0 Perhaps the first one in our school, but certainly the first in my circles.<\/p>\n
I think I stalked him a bit and we became friends.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
The TRS-80 had graphics (of a sort) as well as an ASCII (text) screen in black and white.\u00a0 Actually more of a black-ish and green-ish, but you get the idea.\u00a0 Two colors.\u00a0 That time coincided with the advent of some of the first Infocom text adventures.\u00a0 Those games typically kicked my butt.\u00a0 I could not figure out how to get the Babel Fish in to my ear in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.\u00a0 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!\u00a0 That sense of discovery that came with a bit more information, a bit more description from the game was heady.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 They were replacing those with Apple II computers, I think.\u00a0 Whatever happened to those guys…<\/p>\n
The Commodore Pet was an incredible machine to my eyes.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Not offset and pretty closely positioned together.\u00a0 It messed up my typing on a regular keyboard for years.\u00a0 The chassis even opened up so you could access the board housing the CPU, memory and other parts.\u00a0 It had a bar to hold it open like the hood of a car.\u00a0 This thing even had it’s own tape drive on which I could store programs!\u00a0 It was contained It had 8K of memory, which meant roughly 8192 characters worth of information at one time.\u00a0 That’s not much more than the length of this article.\u00a0 So, not much in retrospect, but, it seemed like a world of opportunities was contained in that metal box.<\/p>\n
I heard that they were getting rid of a perfectly good computer.\u00a0 Unfortunately for me, they wanted the unheard of amount of $300 for the computer.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He very reasonably wanted me to have some skin in the game.\u00a0 It’s a policy I’d continue with my own kids.<\/p>\n
But, in this case I didn’t have $150.\u00a0 I think I had maybe $50.<\/p>\n
I went home knowing I was going to ask but knowing the odds of the conversation going well were very low.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
But, I asked.\u00a0 I pitched that computer as the best deal possible.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And the time pressure!\u00a0 It was only on sale for a couple of weeks as I recall.<\/p>\n
Unsurprisingly, the answer was No.<\/p>\n
In his defense, this was a pretty unreasonable request given our previous understanding of me having half the money.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But, of course, I was devastated.<\/p>\n
Days passed and I tried to scheme ways I could make the money.\u00a0 I asked my Dad if there were jobs or chores I could do to make money.\u00a0 But, there was nothing that I could come up with.<\/p>\n
As the final day approached and I was getting ready to go to school, I made my last ditch plea.\u00a0 I begged, asking if there was ANY way he could help me with this, I would appreciate it so much.<\/p>\n
My Dad is not and was not perfect.\u00a0 None of us are.\u00a0 And he didn’t know a computer from a cash register.\u00a0 But, he knew that this was important to me and he probably didn’t even know why it was important to me.<\/p>\n
He wrote me a check for that computer.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I got my computer!\u00a0 It was MY computer.<\/p>\n
It came with a few tapes from a monthly computer-based magazine called Cursor.\u00a0 On these tapes came games and demos and applications.\u00a0 Importantly to me, most were written in BASIC, the language that came with the Commodore PET.\u00a0 By running those programs and looking at listings of the programs, I could learn programming.\u00a0 And I did learn programming!\u00a0 I absorbed every issue with the intensity that only an obsessed teenager is capable.<\/p>\n
I certainly didn’t know how to talk with girls, but I knew how to talk to that computer!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Now, that computer did have issues.\u00a0 I mentioned the chassis that lifted so you could access the board inside.\u00a0 Dropping from the underside of the monitor was a large bundle of wires that socketed on the board for the video.\u00a0 Turns out the Commodore PET was a bit notorious for having a flakey connection to the video.\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n
Looking back, I wish I had been able to hold on to that computer.\u00a0 I spent most of the next three years with it, learning its ins and outs.\u00a0 But, in the end, I was swayed by the latest home computer from Commodore, the VIC-20 because it had COLOR!<\/p>\n
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!).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 I appreciate it to this day!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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