That Brøderbund triple crown never fails to bring me back to the half-underground computer software shop on the Main Street in my town some time in the early 1990s. I would read about upcoming games in PC Magazine, and visit almost daily when a new game came out to see if they had it in stock yet.

Either that shop was pretty casual about staying on the cutting edge, or release dates were fuzzier back then, because it would often be months of agonized visits before the game showed up on shelves. By then, of course, I’d have gotten another PCMag, and my attention had leapt to a different — clearly far more advanced and interesting — game that was “only days” from launch.

Anyway, during one of my Saturday morning visits to the musty-smelling and over-dehumidified shop, I ended up idly browsing through the Borland section and a Turbo C box caught my eye. My dad was incredibly pumped that I was showing an interest in something that could actually be productive and creative, so he bought it for me.

Unfortunately, nine-year-old me did not turn out to be a natural prodigy. My dad’s coding experience stopped somewhere south of FORTRAN (he had juggled some accounting systems for ABC in the early 1980s) so he tried his best but couldn’t really make it click for me.

So Turbo C went back on the shelf. Dark Forces was coming out next month, and I didn’t have time for twiddling with incomprehensible runes when there were stormtroopers to kill.

What could have been.