This computer could even speak, converting text to speech in an inhuman monotone that delighted my family. I was entranced by the mouse, and the games, such as Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel, which offered rich, immersive realms that you could explore just by clicking. That first Mac was something incredible to Childhood Me. Later in the 1980s, my family abandoned Commodore for Apple, and I have used some kind of Macintosh ever since. Today’s computer programs are mysterious creations delivered whole to the user, but the old ones had a legible structure. I saw how bugs occurred – I have a distinct memory of that skiing program creating graphical gibberish on one side of the screen, until I fixed the text – and I also saw that there was a logic and texture to computer programs. Typing code into my computer brought me closer to the machine. The tens of millions of lines of code that make up Microsoft Office won’t fit in a magazine. These programs were common then, but no longer. Want to play a fun skiing game? Then type out the computer program into your computer, line by line, and get to play it yourself. While you could buy software for the VIC-20 (like the racecar game), a major way that people acquired software in those days was through computer code published in the pages of magazines. My most vivid memories are of the games whose code I typed in myself. Instead of a yellow pie with a mouth, it used racing cars. One of the cassettes we bought was a Pac-Man clone that my brother and I would play. I used to play games on it, with cassette tapes that served as primitive storage devices. Billed by its pitchman, Star Trek’s William Shatner, as the ‘wonder computer of the 1980s’, I have many fond memories of this antiquated machine. My family’s first computer was the Commodore VIC-20.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |