Childhood Computing

I recently stumbled upon a nice blog post titled Childhood Computing. It made me think about my own childhood computing experience. I am much older than the author of the aforementioned post, but like them, I too love computers. I have for most of my life.

In 1992, when I was eight years old, my parents decided to transfer me to a new school because of its curriculum. They did not know it then, and it probably did not even matter to them, but this new school had a computer lab. That was quite remarkable for its time. I grew up in a very tiny industrial town. The computers in the lab were hand-me-downs from the silica factory around which the town was built. We got only about two hours of time per month in the computer lab, but the little time I got there opened up a whole new world for me.

Before entering the lab, we had to leave our shoes at the door. 'These are expensive machines. We must keep them free of dust', our teacher would say. It was a ritual. The computers were very old IBM PC compatible machines, mostly with monochrome cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors. They had no hard disks at all. They had a few hundred kilobytes of RAM. Every time, we performed the same ritual. Insert a 5¼-inch floppy disk to load MS-DOS into memory. Then insert another disk to load LOGO.COM. Then write small Logo programs and watch the turtle move. I have written more about that early Logo programming experience here: FD 100. Further, since there were no hard disks and storage was at a premium, nothing was ever saved. The moment you turned off the computer, all your work vanished. So saving a program meant literally writing the program down in a physical notebook.

Since I had so little time with an actual computer, most of my Logo programming happened with pen and paper at home. I would 'test' my programs by tracing the results on graph paper. Eventually, I would get about thirty minutes of actual computer time in the lab to run them for real. One particular Logo program I still remember very well drew a house with animated dashed lines, where the dashes moved around the outline of the house. Everyone around me loved it, copied it and tweaked it to change the colours, alter the details and add their own little touches. That must have been my first 'free and open source software'. The 'licence' was 'do whatever you want but show me if you make any interesting modifications'. The distribution system was entirely analogue: classmates copied the code into their notebooks with pencils, then went back to their machines in the lab and typed it back into the computer.

Occasionally, when we successfully completed the Logo programming exercises our teacher set us as challenges, he would let us play computer games too. The first computer game I ever played was Moon Bugs. Space Invaders, Bricks and Dangerous Dave were some of my other favourites. Space Invaders inspired me to write my own game, but the little GW-BASIC programming I knew back then and the very limited access to computers I had then were insufficient to write anything more sophisticated than simple text-based input/output programs. But eventually, in 2022, as an adult, I did manage to write an Invaders-like game, which you can find here: Andromeda Invaders. Although thirty years too late, writing this game fulfilled a childhood dream!

One of my buddies liked the game called Digger developed by Windmill Software. It soon became my favourite as well. The game came on a self-booting disk, so we did not have to go through the elaborate ritual of first inserting a floppy disk to load DOS. We could insert the Digger floppy disk directly and the computer would boot and start the game immediately.

Another computer game I remember fondly was Grand Prix Circuit by Accolade. I really loved typing the command GPEGA to launch the game, knowing that in a moment I would be greeted with its excellent opening music. Grand Prix Circuit blew my mind. As a child who only knew how to draw basic two-dimensional geometrical shapes with Logo and GW-BASIC, I found it astounding that a computer program could create a projection of a three-dimensional fictional world that you could navigate with keyboard inputs. How was it even possible, I wondered.

It has been over thirty years since then, but the memories and the feelings still remain fresh in my mind. There are times when I can close my eyes and recall the buzzing sound of the dozen or so computers running in the lab, the beeps from the power-on self-tests (POST) and the distinctive, strangely pleasant smell of the closed, air-conditioned room. For some reason, that smell is one of the strongest memories I have from those days. I have never been able to describe it well, but once in a while I encounter it in very unexpected places, like a corridor somewhere, or a store, and it takes me right back to those early days of childhood computing. Those childhood computing experiences form some of my strongest and most vivid memories. They were such magical experiences, full of wonder and exploration.