Well I lost the link, but earlier today I read on an O’Reilly blog about how a bunch of pros first got started in computers. I thought it might be fun to look back…. (wavey flashback effect)

How I First Got Started In Computers

I’m pretty sure the very first computer experience I had was Logo. You know, the little turtle thing? That’s a hazy one, but I’m pretty sure Logo was the very first.

The earliest computer I owned was the Tandy Color Computer from Radio Shack, the TRS-80. Good stuff– you had to hook it up to the television, which led to two things…

1) My siblings and I would fight over whether I would get to use the computer or they would get to watch cartoons.

2) I made the joke where we were watching real TV and I typed on the keyboard and pretended that I was controlling the people on TV. That one never got old, all the way through the PS2.

Anyway, I learned to program in BASIC on the TRS-80. Yes, of course…

10 PRINT “MIKE IS COOL”
20 GOTO 10

… everyone did that. I also did things like…

10 PRINT “WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”
20 INPUT $NAME
25 PRINT “HOW ARE YOU?”
30 INPUT $HOW
40 PRINT “HI THERE, ” $NAME “I AM ” $HOW “, TOO.”

It was awesome. Later, I got into file opening and writing and saving (although only scratched the surface of interacting with the external 5 1/2 floppy), and cobbled together a program that held addresses. Not that I knew anyone whose address I had to keep, but it was cool. Later, we started using Apple IIes at school, and the teacher had no idea where I got all these programming skillz from. Well, that was before skillz or 1337ness existed, but you get the idea. I was a gamer even then– I played religiously all the old arcade ports on the TRS-80. I found text adventures, and tumbled into them as into a dark cave, where I was likely to be eaten by a grue. I didn’t actually write one until a few years later, when I bought a TI-85 graphic calculator, and hobbled together a weird little text adventure with the version of BASIC they had installed on there. Oooh– I also made a text version of Street Fighter on the calculator, too, although it wasn’t very balanced. Each character (I was one, natch) had three attacks, but while the third was the strongest, there was no penalty to use it. “Why wouldn’t I just hit really hard every time?” my friend asked, and I had no answer yet. Stamina, at that point, hadn’t made it into my vocabulary.

My parents were never big on computers. That Tandy held us for a long time. In middle school, I got a Brother word processor that wasn’t actually programmable, but we bought it as a display unit, and so we had to wait like six to eight weeks for them to send the manual to us. Long before it showed up, I knew the ins and outs of that thing. When my mom had to type a letter, she had to ask me what all the keyboard shortcuts were. Actually, she only asked me how to print, but I’m pretty sure I told her all the shortcuts anyway.

In middle school, we also got upgrades at school. Windows 3.1 was out and big, and I was introduced to Prince of Persia, the Incredible Machine, Wacky Races, Descent, and, later, Doom and Quake. We were allowed to run free in the computer lab after school (well, a select few nerds among us were), and that’s where I messed around with the Program Manager, DOS, “.exe”s.

And then, when I was in high school, my manager at my first job gave me an old 486 that he wasn’t using any more to take home. And that’s when things got really interesting.

But this is only how I started in computers. And I didn’t even mention finding Super Mario Brothers for the first time, the day I finally got my own NES, how I saved up for my Game Boy (with Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening), and the first game I ever beat front to back. Another story, I guess.