Reminiscing

It was 1982 and I was 10 or 11 years old. I'd always been interested in computers and electronics and read science fiction almost exclusively. Of course, being 9 years old and it being only 1981 and all, I'd never actually seen a computer - I'd only read about them.

There was a local electronics shop (Brian Snell, just down the road on George Street in my home town of Dunedin, New Zealand) which had a spectacular display of new-fangled digital watches. These things had all sorts of amazing features. There were calculators and and even games on these. I had a Casio watch which had a golf game with a little man and a tiny black dot on a green-shaded LCD background.

One day, after school, I went into this shop to look at the watches and calculators and spotted something new; in the middle of the store was a small black box connected to a TV set. The TV screen was completely white (well, a slightly fuzzy light-gray to be accurate) with a small black-on white "K" in the bottom left corner. I was curious and went to investigate.

Upon closer inspection I saw that this small black wedge of plastic had keys of sorts - a flat plastic panel with white sqaures upon which were printed letters, words and blocky black-and-white shapes. I'd press "P" and the word "PRINT" would appear on the TV before me. I pressed a few buttons and more nonsense would appear. When I pressed "NEW LINE" a strange message would appear informing me of a "SYNTAX ERROR", whatever that was. This was exciting.

After a while of standing in front of this thing, a Sinclair ZX81 as it turned out, one of the sales staff came over and asked if I'd like the manual. "Yes Please!" said I, and away he went, soon returning with a spiral bound book with a glossy and futuristic picture of a spaceship flying over what appeared to be space-age blue buildings. This was the "ZX81 BASIC PROGRAMMING MANUAL". Within its pages were the most incredible things I had read in my life. It contained instructions for making this ZX81 do things; not just any things but things that I wanted it to do.

I probably started with 10 PRINT "HELLO, I AM A COMPUTER". It was almost certainly no more involved than that. But when I pressed "R" and "RUN" appeared before me, and pressed "NEW LINE" and saw those words that I had commanded displayed on that screen, it changed my life.

My memory of that time is a bit faded and the details a little unsure but I clearly remember the thrill of it. I remember the deep feeling that this was what I wanted to do with my life. Within a couple of weeks I had taught myself enough BASIC (still standing in front of that machine in the shop; there was no chair) that I was writing demo programmes and games for the various electronics shops in town.

From that moment back in 1982 I never had a problem answering that simple but so complex question; "What do you want to do when you grow up?"

* This story was first published at Gear Diary