Let me take you on a journey back into the 1980’s, a decade often mocked, but nonetheless, it was the proud forge I was smelted in.
I’m going to guess it was around 1986. My grandmother had just been killed in a car accident. I was 9 years old. I cried at the movies when Optimus Prime died. All my friends were getting into video games of some sort. Ben and Jerry had a TSR-80. Matt had his Commodore 64. I had my Intellivision. My cousin, Mike, had his Atari 7800. Of course, Nintendo and Sega were on the scene too, but they weren’t widely available in my cabal of associates until a couple years later.
My father was good to me. He fueled my passions. Around this time, he bought me a Sega Master System. It was fun to play, but the game selection was lacking in my opinion. Then, I moved up to an NES. Around the same time, all my peers had done the upgrade as well. Playing these games made me think differently. They made me wonder with my senses, not only my imagination. I wanted to learn how this was done. How were these images and sounds dancing fancifully across my screen and leading me on a journey?
Mattel Intellivision systems and games were on clearance at the local Kay Bee Toys. The games were a buck a piece, but what changed my life was the little-known Intellivision BASIC interpreter. My father paid $25 for it.
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This “computer” was similar to other BASIC interpreters out there. I was able to connect a cassette tape recorder to use it as analog storage for my code. One nice feature was being able to insert an Intellivision cartridge into the unit and be able to extract graphical content from the game. I was probably 11 or 12 by this point. I hadn’t taken any classes in algebra. So, when I was looking at the instruction manual, it was beyond complicated.
I spent countless hours tinkering around with code. I began to feel limited. There were no real resources that I could find to help me with programming in this offshoot of BASIC. I wanted to upgrade to a real PC. My father felt I hadn’t tapped the potential of what I currently had, so he gave me a conditional challenge. He said “make the little man move across screen and change colors all while flipping upside down and back again, and play some music in the background.” CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!
I remember pulling my father aside in the wee hours of the morning to claim my victory. I had in fact extracted the “man” from the Dungeons & Dragons game for the Intellivision (not the Treasure of Tarmin). He was flipping across the screen to a disjointed melody while showing his true colors. My father sighed in resignation. The following morning we found a woman selling an Epson 8088 ndesktop PC. It had a sweet monochrome monitor, 1 MB of RAM, and dual 360k floppy drives! It was mine for $500.
This story has many more twists and turns along the way. So, I’ll spare your weary eyes those details for later. I plan to blog about some of my journey into coding now as a 40 year old adult. I’ve done some self-teaching in various programming languages along the way, but raising two children as a single parent has made dedicating time and focusing on achieving expertise impossible.
My children are adults now. It’s time to do this. I will wrestle this Python into submission![/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]