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

program that didn’t just write out HELLO, but instead wrote SARA IS THE BEST on the screen, over and over again. Ordinarily I wasn’t such a loving older brother. Apparently the gesture made a big impression on her.
    I don’t remember doing it. As soon as I wrote a program I would forget about it and move on to the next one.

III
    Let me tell you about Finland. Sometime in October the skies turn an unpleasant shade of gray, and it always looks as if it will either rain or snow. You wake up every day to this gloominess of anticipation. The rain will be chilly and it will rinse away any evidence of summer. When the snow comes, it has that magical quality of making everything bright and painting the place with a veneer of optimism. The trouble is, the optimism lasts about three days but the snow remains for month after bone-numbingly cold month.
    By January you sort of wander around in a shadowy daze, if you choose to go outside. It’s a season of moist, bulky clothes and slipping on the ice hockey rink they created by hosing down the grammar school field you traverse as a short-cut to the bus. On Helsinki streets it means dodging the occasional tottering matron who was probably somebody’s gracious grandmother back in September but by 11 A.M. on a Tuesday in January is weaving on the sidewalks from her vodka breakfast. Who can blame her? It will be dark again in a few hours, and there isn’t a lot to do. But there was an indoor sport that got me through the winter: programming.
    Morfar (the Swedish word for “Mother’s Father”) would be there much of the time, but not all the time. He doesn’t mind if you sit in his room when he’s away. You beg up the money for your first computer book. Everything is in English and it is necessary to decode the language. It’s difficult to understand technical literature in a language you don’t really know that well. You use your allowance to buy computer magazines. One of them contains a program for Morse code. The odd thing about this particular program is that it’s not written in the BASIC language. Instead, it’s written as a list of numbers that could be translated by hand to machine language—the zeros and ones that the computer reads.
    That’s how you discover that the computer doesn’t really speak BASIC. Instead it operates according to a much more simple language. Helsinki kids are playing hockey and skiing with their parents in the woods. You’re learning how a computer actually works. Unaware that programs exist to translate human-readable numbers into the zeros and ones that a computer understands, you just start writing programs in number form and do the conversions by hand. This is programming in machine language, and by doing it you start to do things you wouldn’t have thought possible before. You are able to push what the computer can do. You control every single small detail. You start to think about how you can do things slightly faster in a smaller space. Since there’s no abstraction layer between you and the computer, you get fairly close. This is what it’s like to be intimate with a machine.
    You’re twelve, thirteen, fourteen, whatever. Other kids are out playing soccer. Your grandfather’s computer is more interesting. His machine is its own world, where logic rules. There are maybe three people in class with computers and only one of them uses it for the same reasons. You hold weekly meetings. It’s the only social activity on the calendar, except for the occasional computer sleepover.
    And you don’t mind. This is fun.
    This is after the divorce. Dad lives in another part of Helsinki. He thinks his kid should have more than one interest, so he signs you up for basketball, his favorite sport. This is a disaster. You’re the runt of the team. After a season and a half, you use all sorts of nasty language to tell him you’re quitting, that basketball is his sport, not yours. Your new half-brother, Leo, will be more athletic. Then, too,