Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary Read Free Page A

answer (after all, not many people do), but because this was a long time ago, and calculators didn’t just give you the answer. They calculated it. And they blinked a lot while doing so, mainly in order to give you some feedback that “Yes, I’m still alive, and it takes me ten seconds to do this calculation, and in the meantime I’ll blink for you to show how much work I do.”
    That was fascinating. Much more exciting than a modern calculator that won’t even break into a sweat when doing something as simple as calculating a plain sine of a number. With those early devices you knew that what they did was hard. They made it very clear indeed.
    I don’t actually remember the first time I saw a computer, but I must have been around eleven at the time. It was probably in 1981, when my grandfather bought a new Commodore VIC-20. Since I had spent so much time playing with his magic calculator, I must have been thrilled—panting with excitement to start playing with the new computer—but I can’t really seem to remember that. In fact, I don’t even remember when I got really into computers at all. It started slowly, and it grew on me.
    The VIC-20 was one of the first ready-made computers meant for the home. It required no assembly. You just plugged it into the TV and turned it on, and there it sat, with a big all-caps “READY” at the top of the screen and a big blinking cursor just waiting for you to do something.
    The big problem was that there really wasn’t that much to do on the thing. Especially early on, when the infrastructure for commercial programs hadn’t yet started to materialize. The only thing you could really do was to program it in BASIC. Which was exactly what my grandfather started doing.
    Now, my grandfather saw this new toy mainly as a toy, but also as a glorified calculator. Not only could it compute the sine of a number a lot faster than the old electronic calculator, but you could tell it to do this over and over automatically. He also could now do at home many of the things he had done with the big computers at the university.
    And he wanted me to share in the experience. He also was trying to get me interested in math.
    So I would sit on his lap and he would have me type in his programs, which he had carefully written out on paper because he wasn’t comfortable with computers. I don’t know how many other preteen boys sat in their grandfather’s room, being taught how to simplify arithmetic expressions and type them correctly into a computer, but I remember doing that. I don’t remember what the calculations were all about, and I don’t think I had a single clue about what I really did when I did it, but I was there, helping him. It probably took us much longer than it would have taken him alone, but who knows? I grew comfortable with the keyboard, something my grandfather never did. I would do this after school, or whenever my mother dropped me off at my grandparents’ apartment.
    And I started reading the manuals for the computer, typing in the example programs. There were examples of simple games that you could program yourself. If you did it right you wound up with a guy that walked across the screen, in bad graphics, and then you could change it and make the guy walk across the screen in different colors. You could just do that.
    It’s the greatest feeling.
    I started writing my own. The first program I wrote was the first program everybody else starts out with:
    10 PRINT “HELLO”
    20 GOTO 10
    This does exactly what you expect it to do. It prints out HELLO on the screen. Forever. Or at least until you kill it out of boredom.
    But it’s the first step. Some people stop there. To them, it’s a stupid exercise because why would you want to print out HELLO a million times? But it was invariably the first example in the manuals that came with those early home computers.
    And the magic thing is that you can change it. My sister tells me that I made a radical second version of this