It Blows Away Your Vic-20

Ah, do you remember your first computer with such fondness and loving tribute as I obviously do? If so, read on fellow geek.

My first computer was a Commodore 64, and it arrived in my hands at Christmastime of 1983. I was 11 and enraptured with my fun microcomputer classes held after school on the state-of-the-art Radio Shack TRS 80s. I had the power to make lines of text scroll ad infinitum...well, until someone nobler than I pressed BREAK.

Remember this?

10 PRINT "HEATHER IS A GENIUS"
20 GOTO 10

Oh yeah.

The computer came with no means of saving programs, so many a Saturday I spent typing the program that turned my C64 into a piano-like keyboard just to play Mary Had a Little Lamb or some such nonsense. Then my parents purchased the master contraption - the DATASETTE!

And then there was persistence.

The most interesting thing I wrote with the C64 was something that quizzed me with countries and capitals for the various continents. It even spat out a grade card according to my performance at that given time and modified how many questions it fed me (and in what order) at my whim as a user.

Then, sometime in 1985 I believe, we purchased the printer. It was a Blue Chip Daisy Wheel contraption, and it output far superior text than those dot matrix bozos. I had the best typed papers in class. At some point, the disk drive beckoned, and our package was complete.

This computer remained in my home as the main computer all throughout high school. Only in 1991 did my family acknowledge that perhaps it was time to join the revolution and upgrade. The family pet, as it were, was sold to my father's former secretary for help in running her household.

Lunch is over - but one more thought. Change that screen text color to Cyan!

What power. GOSUB Work.

hln

Posted by hln at April 24, 2003 12:07 PM | Anecdote