Memories: First exposure to computers

Nevertheless that kit started me on a 40 year programming career bringing me and my family to California.

Later in life, my first proper exposure to computers came when the fourth grade teacher's assistant noticed I had an interest in science-type stuff and arranged to get me an hour a day on the school's one and only Apple ][+ (kept in the school's main office). He would bring me piles of books about computers and leave me to it, and afterward would ask me questions about what I'd learned. He also introduced me to his Commodore 64, which was a far superior machine to the Apple ][+ at the time. Both were 64K of RAM, and 1Mhz CPU, but the Commodore machines were just graphically (and audibly) superior.

Actually ended up running my first business on an Apple ][+ for several years because my mum (who bought me my first computer in my early teens) insisted on Apple because it was the name brand she'd heard a lot and therefore assumed was good, despite my insistence that the Commodore Amiga I wanted was far better value for the money. Still can't complain, as that Apple ][+ ended up paying for itself multiple many times over and eventually bought me my first Amiga, too. Pretty good for a machine with 64K of RAM, 1Mhz CPU, and 300baud acoustic phone modem… :~)

The kit itself include 60+ bits of software (mostly disks, a few cartridges) from games to productivity (geos!), monitor, printer, disk drive, light pen, speech synthesizer, fast-load cartridge, 300 baud modem, and tape drive.

Geos was my introduction to productivity and was used for all of my reports until we got a PC many years later, the modem connected me to Quantumlink (which eventually became AOL), and Gortek and the Microchips taught me basic programming.

Receiving that gift was one of those things that really shaped the rest of my life.

My parents weren't well off (Dad was a docker, mum worked part-time as a travel agent), living in the pretty run-down area of Northern city (the cheap end of L4 in Liverpool, UK, if anyone cares). The idea of getting my own computer was something I hadn't ever really considered.

So, the day arrives, and I get the TV (Wow!) and a printed circuit board with a bunch of components, otherwise known as the ZX81 in kit form. I spend a good month or two watching TV, as kids are wont to do, and eventually parental pressure to "get that fucking thing working, lad" mounts to the level where it can't be ignored any more.

Go down to the shed in the back yard (for Americans, a UK 'back yard' doesn't mean a garden at the back of the house, in our case it was a small, cemented over 'private alley' to the real alley (where the bins were) at the back of the row of houses. My dad had somehow crammed a shed in there) - and started to solder.

Took the weekend, as I recall, because I wasn't great at soldering at 11, but eventually it seemed to plug in and turn on - got the BASIC prompt and everything. Read through the manual, and there was a demo line to type in and show things were working. I worked through the example, got sufficiently confident, and the entire family convened in the lounge (where the only other TV was) to watch this modern wonder...

I typed in:

    PRINT 2 + 2 = 4

    1

I've never done CS (I'm an aging physicist if anything from 30 years ago matters in that regard) but I was hooked, initially on games, but also on what you can actually do with these things. These days I live far away from that 2-up/2-down Liverpool terraced house, in sunny California. Been working for Apple for nigh on 20 years, and coding for the last 40 or so. I don't think any single thing has changed my life more than that ZX81 kit. It wasn't even my favourite 8-bit computer (that would be the Atari XL I bought when Dixons were selling them off for £99 with a disk-drive) but it was certainly the one with the most impact.

I'm not sure it's actually been good for me, as I lay here with a chronically inflamed lower back and terrible skills in meatspace; but while it's consumed my life, it has brought prosperity to my family.

The seduction of the virtual.

Of course, in other parts of the world it is probably still be a special experience some people don't get to have as a normal part of growing up.

The game in question: https://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=7...

In middle school wrote Basic code on an HP-2000E. High school summer job writing C code on a PDP-11/70? running Version 6 or 7 Unix. Later, spent a summer at Bell Labs. Bjarne was working down the hall on C with objects. Rob Pike demoed a wire-wrapped Blit prototype. I wrote an assembler for an Ikonas frame buffer in Turner Whitted's graphics group for a C compiler port.

We played some BASIC games on the mainframe. I was around 5 years old. I discovered an Apple II buried in the corner of the library at my school and I was the only person who used it! Then a family friend bought a VIC-20 and I was totally enchanted by it.

My parents bought a Timex Sinclair 1000 and I typed in games from books into it, then a Tandy MC-10, Commodore 64, Atari 130XE and finally an Atari ST. That was 1988.

It's fascinating to think back at how much happened during those 8 years, computer-wise...

Finally, my dad bought our first actual computer that didn't need a modem: the Acorn Electron, the little brother of the BBC Micro, which had a big port in the back where you could expand it: a printer interface that also included two cartridge slots, a disk interface that included a 3.5" disk drive (we would actually move from 3.5" diskettes to 5.25" after the release of the IBM PC), and a rom box that used to expand the rom of our 32 kB ram machine to 224 kB rom. Pascal editors and modem software directly available from rom. But the computer would often hang the moment you turned it on, and it didn't have an on/off button; you had to unplug it to reset it.

At some point my dad also brought home a massive luggable PC from work: a big suitcase where the bottom would fold away to become the keyboard, revealing two disk drives with a tiny screen in between.

Later, he bought an XT PC, and I think my brother did something that would hook it up to the Electron where one could be a terminal for the other.

He still had the Spectrum in pristine condition in its original box last year when he died of cancer. I'd love to have it, but don't really want to ask my aunt and cousin for it.

But then it looped back to ask the questions for the next game, and updated the rolling averages, which of course took into account the information from previous iterations. My jaw hit the floor when I realized the immense power of being able to do things like this -- the possibilities are endless! Something changed in my mind in that very moment, and it's never changed back. From that day on, I was obsessed with thinking about what sort of computer programs I could write.

I then saved paper run money for ages (18 months maybe) and bought myself a 48k Spectrum. The Spectrum wasn't even out when I started saving - just that a computer of some description was the goal. I don't think I would have had the patience to keep saving another year or so for something like a C64.

In the late 1980s, while doing tech support, I wanted to do some data conversion, and taught myself Eclipse assembler. That and writing macros for the AOS/VS CLI got me going with programming.

On holiday in Denmark a local bookshop had a green screen terminal that I was enthralled with, and there was the IKEA store terminals.

I think a teacher piqued by my passion had arranged for a Commodore PET computer to be set up in our class for a few days, maybe it was just coincidence.

Ah, but where are all the stories from people who were inspired into programming by using Java?

I was wondering about Markus Persson (aka Notch) who wrote Minecraft in Java, but: "Persson started programming at the age of seven, using his father's Commodore 128"

First computer at home: my dad brought home an IBM clone circa 1986. He had a buddy at work (he was an insurance agent) that was really into pirating games, who gave him one bankers box full of floppies, and another full of photocopied manuals.

I was in his office number of times. Journey usually was starting in the morning. We did not have a car so we were taking a tram, about 45 mins to get there. Then about 5 mins walk and we are saluted by fully armed soldier. Then my dad calls the captain, using a phone handed over by another soldier behind the desk, asking if he can enter facility with his son. Permission granted, we enter.

For me, that was a completely different and magical world behind that gate. Everything neat and tidy, very unlike the world outside. My dad was taking me to his room (no open spaces back then) shared with one maybe two colleagues. Each had a terminal and a phone on their desks. Room was full of documentation books, punch cards here and there, other strangely formatted papers. I was allowed to wander through the office, use lifts (very hi-techy compared to what I saw before) and so on. I was 10. A boy in communist country in a middle of such facility.

Every now and then my dad was taking me to the main DC. One of the places I could not enter on my own. For me, it was stunning. Risen floor (with cables running below), noisy climate control and a room, 40m x 40m maybe full of mixture of washing machine or refrigerator size devices. One corner of that place was behind a glass with people in white coats there. Considering the noise, probably a good idea. One, maybe two of them, were wandering around in that DC looking at all the flashy lights.

So my dad was walking me around, telling me what those devices were: that's the disk (10MB If I remember correctly), that's the tape backup, that's a printer (A3 printer, noisy and fast), and here it is, that's the main CPU. I think it was IBM, but cannot be sure. There was also this Odra system there, probably with 1Mhz CPU, being a top of the line back then. In our country.

Later on my dad got a PC from his employer, it was a 4.77Mhz 8086 PC with 20MB disk. I was allowed to use it. This was the machine that got me into programming. It was so slow and noncompetitive to Atari and Amiga that the only fun thing to do with it was to program it. That sealed the deal.