When I was 9 years old in 1982 I had a basic concept of what a home computer was because earlier that year we had visited my parent’s families in Boston, MA. and my cousins had an Apple II. What I basically understood a computer to be was a device that plays video games that you can save to disk and continue to play the same game another day. We had an Atari 2600 at home but after the initial novelty of it wore off it really was not that entertaining for me. My friend had an Intellivision, which was a step up, but a computer like the Apple II really captured my imagination due to the fact it could remember things which allowed for much longer and more involved games.

I don’t know how my parent’s picked the Commodore 64, probably because it was a lot cheaper than an Apple II, but initially I was pretty disappointed that it was not the computer my cousins had. However, as soon as I saw the promt and blinking cursor I was hooked. There was something fascinating for me about typing in words that make the computer do something, like it was more intelligent than a typical gaming console. The Commodore came with a book, or my parents bought it, about how to operate and program the Commodore 64.

I studied that book and experimented with the computer and found that even more than playing games I liked programming it. My mother and my brother only really needed to learn one command, LOAD “$”,8,1 which would run whatever executable was on the disk (in this case it would be a game of some sort). My dad did not even learn that much. Myself on the other hand went deep into the mysteries of BASIC and began programming.

My first programs were basically choose your own adventure text based games like Zork. They started out quite simple printing a paragraph or two of text then two options like A) SWING YOUR SWORD or B) RUN AWAY and just using GOTO commands to bring up the next bit of story. I got to the point where I had a couple pretty involved stories with 3 or 4 choices after every section of text but I really stepped it up a level when I began learning some basic math functions and graphics display’s.

There was one game I really tried to emulate for a bit called Bard’s Tale. In Bard’s Tale you could go wherever you wanted and gain experience, collect items, and have combat based on random numbers and stats like hit points and damage and so on. I really got most of it down pretty well except for the maps which I never really figured out when I was 9 and really didn’t figure out how to do that in BASIC until 30 years later really. I also made a couple games using sprites and joystick detection but one of them was pong and the other was a one level side scrolling game where you moved a spaceship up or down to avoid obstacles for about 30 seconds. If you made it through you won. If you didn’t you lost.

I really got into that Commodore 64 for a year or two but somewhere along the line I lost interest and never touched another computer again for almost 15 years. I was much too busy pursuing sex, drugs, and rock & roll to even look at a computer and while I was off doing that things changed quite a bit. So much so that by the next time I made an attempt to do anything with a computer my son was born, the internet had been invented, and I didn’t even know how to turn a computer on.

That will have to be a story for another day though as I am out of time for now. Til next time.