Programming and Early Computer Use

Links:

Overview
PC programming
NeXT
Apple watching
Tandy portables
Newton Usin'

I started computing when my mother tried to get my brother and me out of the house since we must have been pesky annoying pre-teens right around then. We took a computer course in BASIC at the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science in Durham, NC. Simple programs, adding numbers (let x=1, x=x+1, print x, goto 10..... stuff like that), nothing special. We liked it, so we went to the next computing course, which was something offered at Duke. What they must have been thinking, I don't know - two kids, aged 11 and 13 sit in on a class with profs trying to learn MS-DOS.... that was DOS 1.0, and I'm not kidding. We were among the first people on campus to get DOS 1.1. Oooooooh, boy. And I was 11 and all this was really really exciting.

My bro and I got to playing, and we found a game that was pretty fun to play. Someone had come up with a Space Invaders type game in basic (using basica on an old 32k or (OH MY GOD!!!) 64k IBM behemoth). We played it. We thought we could do something similar. So we tried to write Donkey Kong. Not the first round (we couldn't figure out how to make the little barrels roll down the hill), but the second round, where Mario runs over the rivets in the building, and the fires chase you around.

We weren't very efficient programmers.

We wrote it anyway.

It was a fun game.

Reading the code these days makes me laugh.

We never really went beyond this programming feat, and our loss of social life as crazed geeks wasn't too helpful, either. Later on, when we had our Coleco Adam, we never really got into programming. I mean, OTHER people wrote the programs, you know? After all, it had built in Colecovision (we just never had money to buy games, spending it on books instead - see, I told you we were geeks).

Anyway, that was the end of my first computing phase. Even when we were in high school and working on mainframes or whatever they were (vt100's and the like, as far as I recall, and vt52's or whatever those paper-printing units were), I wasn't all that into computing anymore. I mean, I knew my way around, friends were hooking up to BBS's on their 1200 baud modems, but I wasn't really into it...

Oh, well. The change came when I moved on to college and got my hands on a Mac and later on a NeXT. Read on...