Category: Culture (Page 3 of 3)

[I’ve been on a nostalgia trip lately thinking about the computers that influenced me growing up. They were a perfect metaphor for our latch-key generation: “Here’s a device with limited instructions. Good luck!” I know they changed the way I think, and this week, I’ll be blogging about the early computers that influenced me.]

Commodore 64

Released: August 1982 – April 1994(!)

Specs: 64KB RAM, 1.023MHz CPU

“Gee, Will, with access to so many computers and parents who owned a bookstore, you must have been rich!”

No, we weren’t rich. My father ran the bookstore into the ground with his sketchy accounting and customer service (“It can’t be cheaper back in Michigan. They print the price on the fucking cover!”) by 1984 or so, but even at its height, there were only so many Judith Krantz novels and books about snakes we could sell. Soon, my father was working as a furniture mover and security guard, and my mother was working at a doctor’s office and as an EMT.

I was lucky in a few important ways, though:

1. My parents had very strange financial priorities, often involved with keeping up appearances of our social class. So we’d eat Dinty Moore beef stew with my father’s restored Porsche parked out in the driveway.
   
2. My grandparents, much better money managers, must have asked my parents at key birthdays and Christmas what my sister and I wanted.
   
3. My family as a whole likes to give dramatic, wish-fulfilling gifts. (Which sucks as adults because we all have most of what we want.)

So it came to be for my twelfth birthday in 1985 that I got a Commodore 64 home computer. I remember my father did a lot of research and asked around to discover that it was a superior product for the price, which was essentially true. It came out of the box with a lot of features that required upgrades to an Apple II.

My father also imposed a rule for the Commodore: no games except ones I wrote myself. That felt draconian at the time, but in retrospect, it sparked me to learn programming in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise.

He eventually got a professional job again (at a mental institution, ironically), and my first black-and-white monitor for the Commodore was almost certainly pilfered from there, because that’s how he rolled.

Before I could work on games, my father was obsessed first and foremost with having me write a program that he could use as an address book.

What he craved was the convenience of:

1. Sitting down at the computer.
   
2. Inserting a tape into the cassette drive and fast-forwarding to a spot we’d written down for the counter.
   
3. Typing LOAD “ADDRESSBOOK”,1.
   
4. Pressing Play on the tape deck and waiting patiently for the program to load at 55 bytes per second.
   
5. Typing RUN.
   
6. Entering a person’s name precisely spelled in answer to a prompt.
   
7. Waiting briefly for the program to churn through some READ and DATA statements.
   
8. Receiving the requested phone number, assuming the person was in the data.

Even as a kid, I thought this was insane, so I suppose this marks my first encounter with unreasonable client demands for software.

It was also my first encounter with development delays and bad project management because he left my mother for another woman before I finished writing the program.

(And thank God, because as funny as I make him sound, he was a dangerous and violent sociopath and he exits the story here.)

In his absence, I got cracking on those games, including a Star Trek ship simulator.

My friends and I would position the coffee table and TV in the living room to be the bridge of the ship, and I’d write a program that could accept commands for navigation and combat. You could enter a heading and a warp factor, and the computer would show you scrolling stars as the ship was underway. At random intervals, Klingons would attack, and it was possible to fight them off with phasers and photon torpedoes after declaring Red Alert.

There are no pictures of this bridge setup, alas, but this was the computer at the time:

It was really a prop for role-playing more than an actual game, and that source code had to be an ungodly mess as I added feature after feature to make it better. A few friends remember my frustration at debugging that resulted in some loosened keys, but then, shit was blowing up on the Enterprise all the time like that.

What I learned most from that Commodore 64 was the power of tinkering and incremental changes based on making something user friendly. It wasn’t necessary to get the exact product you wanted on the first try, though my anxiety disorder didn’t let that part sink in for many more years.

The programs I wrote on the Commodore were all about entertaining people, and that’s a practice I maintain today not only with my fiction but also with my design and technical work. I’m less interested in what I can help people DO than in how I can make them FEEL. The Commodore’s emphasis on audio and graphics made that easy.

And yeah, I still own one (not the original).

[I’ve been on a nostalgia trip lately thinking about the computers that influenced me growing up. They were a perfect metaphor for our latch-key generation: “Here’s a device with limited instructions. Good luck!” I know they changed the way I think, and this week, I’ll be blogging about the early computers that influenced me.]

Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III

Released: July 1980 – September 1983

Specs: 16KB RAM, 2MHz CPU

Oh, Radio Shack, my favorite store as a kid: home of the 160-in-One Electronic Projects Kit, the Archer Space Patrol walkie-talkies, the PRO-46 radio scanner, the nigh-useless Armatron robot limb, and a whole bunch of adequate computers. I loved those catalogs when they came in the mail.

A couple of my childhood friends had the TRS-80 Color Computer, but the alpha nerds on the block – usually adult men for whom ham radio was too sexy – owned one of the massive Model I, Model II, Model III, or Model 4 computers. (Yes, oddly, they didn’t truck with the Roman numeral IV at Radio Shack.)

The Model III I first encountered was in the home of Eric Jones, the grown man who’d volunteered with foolhardy optimism to be the Computers merit badge counselor for our Boy Scout troop.

He’d told my father that he’d once taught at the American University of Beirut, which my old man told me was code for being a CIA agent. Maybe that was true. Mr. Jones (hell, maybe Dr. Jones, I don’t know) had the quiet patient badassery of someone who knew what democracy (or at least American hegemony) really cost.

By small town coincidence, Mr. Jones’s wife Margaret had been my third-grade teacher, the first of many educators who’d wonder what the hell was wrong with me. Her diagnosis in 1981 pretty much nailed it:

And luckily that problem has not persisted to this very day. Ahem.  

Three years after Mrs. Jones coped with what could be politely called my “quicksilver” (slippery and toxic) mind, it was her husband’s turn as he explained the workings of TRS-80 Level 2 BASIC in their den.

I did not take to it well.

One of the few values that both my parents agreed upon was that our family was eerily and perhaps tragically smarter than 99.9% of the human population, one generation or so removed from evolving into hyper-brilliant orbs of effervescent light. Work was something people like us invented robots or conned others into doing, and a single cursory read-through of a book would be enough to supervise a heart transplant or the construction of a nuclear reactor.

We were skimmers, not studiers. All we needed was the gist and we’d take it from there…if we felt like it.  

The trouble is that programming is not an intuitive inborn gift, at least not back then in BASIC. So I was bewildered to be bewildered by something, and I had no practice in listening carefully to parse out someone’s complex instructions. You can’t extrapolate the syntax of an arbitrary command from the first couple of letters.

You can’t just “get the gist.”

It turns out that ignorant genius is still pretty much indistinguishable from stupidity, and I wince even to this day imagining the Jones family discussing my progress at the dinner table: “You’d think a kid so maladjusted would be smarter.”

I may not be remembering it clearly, but that merit badge seemed to take agonizing weeks to earn, for Mr. Jones at least as much as for me. If he’d really been a CIA assassin, he must have been sorely tempted to garotte me.

The breakthrough finally came when I really listened and did my half of the work integrating what I heard. It was when I realized that the statement:

READ A$, B$, C$

could iterate through a series of DATA statements like this:

DATA Ludwigsen, Will, 555-111-1212, Amemiya, Norman, 555-222-1313,

to produce names and phone numbers.

It came to me like turning on a light. Or, more accurately, like a slowly warming filament over the course of days until it flickers into a dull red glow.

I learned from the Model III (and, more accurately, from Eric Jones), that smarts without input is useless…though it took me many more years to put it into practice.

(And yeah, I got the badge.)