NSLog();

My early computer memories could fill a book, but folklore.org reminded me of a few that surface only rarely. I'm listing them here for myself so that they may serve as a stronghold against the rising tide of forgotten memories. In no particular order…

I think his name was "Aaron" and he worked at Titus Video in my hometown. He once recommended that I rent Demolition Man and seemed to be particularly amused by the "three seashells" joke. We had a lab full of "brand new" 286 PCs in my high school and one day he was making a space ship float around. He explained something about bit-mapping, blitting, and trying to make the sprite animate smoothly. That's the first time I'd heard the word sprite, I believe. I remember wondering why it was so hard for him to get a "sprite" to animate smoothly on the PC. After all, they seemed to animate quite smoothly on the LCIII I had at home (more on that later). 🙂

This is the same lab in which I was exposed to a variety of things, one of which was a small movie file (an early MPEG, perhaps?) of naked people doing naked people things. Tim brought it in and a group of us laughed at it during a BASIC class I was taking in my freshman year. Little did I know I could have tested out of the class and taken Pascal instead.

The BASIC class was taught by Mrs. Ferraro, if I remember correctly, and she didn't particularly care for me. After all, I was a hacker (though not very 1337 of course). I sat in the back (hackers don't sit in the front!) and typed through all of her lectures. Mrs. Ferraro once handed out an assignment which required us to program a virtual supermarket. You could choose items from a list and it would total them for you in the end. We had two weeks, and I was done in the first 45 minutes. I embellished - I added theme music and a scanner-like "bleep" at checkout with a running total of the cost. My program had virtual aisles and you had to type commands like "up" or "pass" or "grab" to move around the store. It calculated sales tax depending on your state and had very primitive ASCII graphics of each of your items as you inspected them. I had about 125 items. Cans were particularly easy to render in ASCII. I remember that a turkey was significantly more difficult, and I settled on a pseudo-drumstick object (which also represented chicken).

We turned the code and application in on the final day, and a week later, I got my "F" back. "Program does not behave as specified" was the reason. After pleading my case to the principal - that I'd be bored, otherwise, and would he rather I be engaging my mind or causing trouble? - I had my A and a renewed distaste for this particular teacher.

This distaste directly lead to my favorite memory of that lab: copying some files off of her machine and installing them on mine. These magic files allowed me to log in and watch (or control) another student's screen. That provided near-endless fun as I'd type code while people went to the restroom, delete characters as they typed them, and dot their screens with satanic messages. I'd even type "bless you" when they sneezed. My solid poker face helped me remain undetected for weeks, though Tim the porn guy knew what I was doing. Amy Williams was most freaked out by this, and was because of this one of my favorite "victims." I could even observe the teacher observing other students. The app was like Apple Remote Desktop.

It was in this same room and at about this same time that I met a guy named Adam Roll (who later transferred to Idaho). He told me about shareware and spent most of his time in the lab trying to draw circles quickly or playing Leisure Suit Larry. I remember being fascinated by the many virtual STDs he acquired. Larry, that is, not Adam.

When I learned BASIC (I didn't know I could test out of BASIC and move right on to Pascal, dammit), I remember writing a golf statistics tracker in my spare time. I'd print out the code, take it home, and write code by hand in the margins. I later realized that I could maintain the same set of code on my Apple IIe emulator (or whatever we had on the LCIII at the time), and began doing just that. I later released the statistics program (complete with its own theme music, splash screens, and persistent data storage) as shareware and requested $5. I have no idea where it is now, but I do know that last year someone mailed me a crisp $5 for the app. I've made $25 from that app all told.

I remember playing on my mom's computers - the same Apple IIes we would "babysit" while school was out in the summer - some game in which you were a fish and you had to decide which other fish to eat (like Dolly Varden, trout, or algae) and in which you had to dive away from an osprey if you were at the top portion of the lake. Of course, I played a helluva lot of Oregon Trail (hunting!!!) and Number Crunchers as well.

I remember spending time with MacPaint in fifth grade. The teacher would basically let us do whatever we wanted for 45 minutes, and everyone was fascinated by the brick pattern and the spray can. I remember he taught us that CAR was how we reset the computers - control-apple-reset. It's the command key, Mr. Wagner! Heh.

My first experience with Extensions in system 7.1 or so was "hey look, they make neat things appear at the bottom of the screen when you start it up." Oscar the Grouch was, without a doubt, my favorite extension. I installed that thing everywhere, and I played a whole helluva lot of Golf. I forget the name of the app - it may have just been "Golf" - but it had a course designer and everything. It fit on a floppy disk. The 800k variety. 🙂

Finally, I remember being rather embarrassed once when we "lost" SimpleText. We took the computer to the service people, who showed us the "Find" command: my dad had moved it to another folder. That embarrassment set me on a long, long, learning spree. I vowed never to really have to ask another person a question about my computer from there to eternity. So far I've lived up to that.

This is in really, really rough form. Tough. I wanted to publish it and worry about polishing it later.

Comments RSS