This post on OxDECAFBAD
(http://www.decafbad.com/blog/geek/newly_digital.html) reminded me of
my introduction to computers. It was in a high school BASIC course in
1982. I took to it pretty well, in spite of the teacher (Mr. Gatchel)
telling me to go suck on my mother's tit over a comment I made about the
teacher's picket line outside of our school. The school had PETs and
WANGs. I remember working on a program and being frustrated that BASIC
did not have a way to have variable variables. I wish I could remember
what I was trying to achieve with that. I also wrote a program that
did an infinite loop that made random PEEKS and POKES to memory. It
crashed the computer in bizarre ways and made parts of the monitor light
up brighter that they were supposed to.
Then we got an Apple IIE at home and I was programming that late into
the night. I wrote a program called "Hotel" that was a text based
adventure game that consisted of opening up different doors of a hotel
and having adventures befall you. Eventually, that program became too
big and crashed that computer, taking a lot of my newly written code
with it. That frustration kind of put me off computers for a while. I
really didn't understand that I was maxing out the computer's memory
with all my lines of "Inside this room is Cujo. Where would you like to
go now?" I was starting to teach my dad how to program it. Then, one
evening I went out to a movie and consumed like 2 litres of Mello Yello
mixed with vodka. When I got home from that, my dad was on the cusp of
getting the mandelbrot set to display on the monitor and needed my help
with a few bugs. So he sat me down in front of the computer. The
monitor and the keyboard were a blur. I grinned like an idiot and told
him that I didn't know what was wrong. It was that night that I learned
how truly odorless vodka was, because my dad with his sensitive nose did
not register a suspicion of my condition, in which it was dangerous for
me to even be in a chair with wheels.
School started the next day.
That year at school, I learned PASCAL and was completely unimpressed
with procedural programming. My mastery of the GOTO statement was
completely useless in that new environment. At 17, I was already an
inflexible programmer attached to the old way of doing things. I drew
pictures of bongs all over my computer homework assignments that year.
I played hours of Bolo and Zork on our home computer. I threw away the
one hobby that would have really served me well for the next 20 years.
2:05:04 PM 
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