The Christmas Gift That Changed My Life
My Commodore 64
The year was 1983. My family walked into Sears at our new local mall. I remained calm outside but felt like I was going to burst. I high-tailed it over to the Commodore 64 display. The store had a computer hooked up to a TV, tempting people to try it. A small group of people stood around that area, not knowing what to do. They seemed afraid to touch anything. I paused briefly, looked around, and then stepped up to the bright blue screen. The blinking cursor pulsed at me from below the READY prompt.
I hunt-and-pecked the short commands into the keyboard:
10 PRINT “RAY”
20 GOTO 10
RUN
The screen filled up with my name. I looked over proudly at my younger brother, and he rolled his eyes. OK, I admit – it was not that amazing. But it was more than most people knew about computers then. And I was not afraid of them.
I had never wanted something so much for Christmas. Sure, there had been Star Wars toys – a Millennium Falcon, an X-wing fighter, the Death Star. We received a Mattel Intellivision video game several years before. That was pretty cool, but this was different. Something about this computer called to me.
At the beginning of my fifth-grade year, getting a computer was becoming more of a reality. Commodore had dropped its price significantly, now to around $200. I looked at our Weekly Reader form at school, searching it for computer books. I found one that taught an introduction to the BASIC programming language. I read it at home and on the school bus. I would be ready if my wish came true.
Christmas morning arrived, and Mom and Dad came through for me. We quickly hooked it up to our living room TV as a temporary spot. Even though I had been determined to hit the ground running, I still wasn’t totally sure what to do with it. I typed out commands from my book and could see them working on the screen. Within a few weeks, I discovered a magazine called “Compute!” at the grocery store with Mom. Those magazines contained longer programs that I entered but were nothing remarkable. My younger brother was still not impressed. None of us were.
But I could feel the underlying potential at my fingertips. Schoolwork came easily to me, but that was mostly about following directions. Working with my Commodore was different. I could type something, hit enter, and something came back to me – instant feedback. The computer was an outlet where I could create. I just didn’t know yet what that was going to be.
We quickly realized that we needed more than just the base computer. Without a floppy disk drive, I would lose my programs every time we turned off the computer. And this separate drive costed more than the computer itself. My mom asked me to wait. Let’s see if you really like this thing before we spend more money. A couple of months later, it was evident that my excitement had not waned. We needed to take the next step and purchase the disk drive.
The Commodore 1541 disk drive came with a thick manual that was unreadable. We were having a difficult time getting started, so my Grandma intervened. Grandma worked at the local school as our elementary school librarian. She was friends with the high school math teacher and approached him for help. He highlighted two or three lines from the hundreds of pages. He created a simple instruction sheet with the next steps. We found some blank 5.25″ floppy disks at the store, formatted them, and now I could save my programs.
I mined various sources for inspiration. We were learning about state capitals that year in 5th grade, so I wrote a program to practice those. 1984 was an election year, so I made a simple program where you could vote for Reagan or Mondale. My most ambitious idea was a program to predict the scores of NFL football games. I took the team statistical data from “The Sporting News” magazine and plugged them into my code. Trust me, Jimmy the Greek was not worried about losing his job. My logic was seriously flawed. But it was fun as I continued to learn.
The movie “WarGames,” starring Matthew Broderick, came out on VHS that year. What is this device called a modem? You can call other computers? That was so cool. That was at the top of my wish list for that next Christmas. Mom and Dad delivered again, and I had my modem. But things started to unravel quickly. We soon discovered that we needed another phone line or no one could call us while I was connected. An even bigger issue was that all of the calls would be long-distance because we lived in a rural area. There was no way we could pay these huge phone bills. We went to the local Target during that last week in December to return the modem.
Along with being able to save my programs, our disk drive gave us the ability to run a bunch of great games. These were a step up in quality from our Intellivision – games like Summer Games, Dr. J vs. Larry Bird Basketball, The World’s Greatest Baseball Game, and Ghostbusters. My brothers and I played these quite a bit, especially sports. The computer software had the real-life team and player names – right up our alley. We could match up our favorite baseball teams (Dodgers vs. Royals) or play with all-stars like George Brett and Cal Ripken. Other than making futile adjustments to my NFL prediction software, my computer programming mostly went dormant during this time.
My next breakthrough came when I took typing as a high school sophomore. From all my time on the computer, I had become talented at hunting-and pecking. I could do around 40 words per minute (wpm). I thought that was good enough. This typing class woke me to realize that I could go much faster. It was not long before I typed 90+ wpm on our electric typewriters. I would argue that my typing class was at least as important to my career as all of the advanced math classes I was required to take over the years.
The following year was my first opportunity to take a formal computer class. The school had a lab of Apple IIe computers for us to use. I couldn’t wait. The downside is that our home economics teacher moonlighted as our school’s computer teacher. She was very nice but knew very little, especially compared to my experience. It was not her fault, and she was trying her best. I blazed through her assignments. The positive was that I had free time to do what I wanted on the computer for the rest of class.
My knowledge and programming toolset expanded. I learned that the computer could generate a random number. I found out about DATA statements where I could store information and access that from within the program. Decades later, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the 10,000 hours concept in his book “Outliers.” Gladwell posited that a person needed to log that much time on their craft to master it. I don’t know when I hit that 10,000-hour mark for programming, but I made a significant dent in that total during this period.
As a senior, I had an inspiration during study hall. I went home that night, sat at the low round wooden table in our living room, and fleshed out more details. The idea came from a dice game we played to kill time after weighing in at our high school wrestling tournaments on Saturday mornings. It was a head-to-head game with two six-sided dice – one red and one blue. Each side had a different result – takedown, reversal, escape, backpoints, pin, penalty. We rolled the dice and then referenced a simple chart for the outcome. Each match would consist of 9 dice rolls, and the person with the most points at the end was declared the winner. It sounds boring, but we made it fun by creating fictional tournaments with ourselves, our coaches, our dads, Dan Gable, and other well-known wrestlers.
My idea was to make a computer program based on our dice game. Generate a random number for the rolls, do the quick conversion, and award the correct points. But I planned to extend this by populating the game with information related to real wrestlers. The wrestlers would be our high school team and the teams we wrestled in our conference in Iowa. We would rate each wrestler’s skill level on their feet (neutral position), top, and bottom. If the wrestler had a good rating on their feet, then they would be more likely to roll a “takedown.” They would have a better chance of pinning their opponent if they were better on top. I wanted to make this more than just the luck of the dice. This concept was becoming a wrestling simulation.
I told my brother about my idea, and he was a massive help in rating all of the wrestlers. I created a loop through all weight classes and tracked the team score. I entered all of the wrestler ratings into the program. It was a text-based game, so there wasn’t much flair, but we added the team colors. This change helped make it seem like we were wrestling on each team’s home mat. I made some slight adjustments that brought some basic strategy into the game. Each player could choose to try moves with a higher reward but higher risk.
This program consumed me. I couldn’t wait to get home to work on it every day after practice. When I had time, I also worked on it at school during study hall.
One of the most amazing things is that other kids at school became interested in what I was doing. Eight of us kids went to school early one morning to assemble in the computer lab. We drew names out of a hat to determine what team each of us would be. We created a small tournament bracket similar to what you see during college basketball’s March Madness every year. We fired up the computers and played out the matches. The winners would advance until we crowned a champion. As we played, the kids asked me how I did this, wanting to learn more about it.
Unfortunately, all this fun was starting to cause a problem for one of the teachers. She needed to figure out what to do with students coming in early to school. Unknowingly, we were creating more work for her as she now had to worry about kids in the computer lab before school. She was not grasping the true spirit of being a teacher, but I don’t want to dwell on the negative. It was great while it lasted.
As high school graduation neared, my friends and I discussed selecting a college major. Our class took a skills test that matched our strengths with potential vocations. My result? Accountant. It made sense because several close relatives were successful in that field. But I had no doubt what I wanted to do. I was confident about computer science as my major. I was not sure how computers were going to fit into my life. But I knew that I never grew tired of working with them.
If someone looked at my resume now, over thirty years later, they would likely assume that my success is because I graduated with a computer science degree from an Ivy League university. But, as I reflect today, I realize that I was essentially homeschooled regarding computers.
Thanks, Mom and Dad, for giving me a Christmas gift that changed my life.
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