Just for fun, I'm taking a trip down geek memory lane.

Some time in the late 70's, my dad bought a KIM 1. It had a whopping 1K of ram and you had to store your programs on a cassette tape. It had a hexadecimal keypad (seen here on the lower right) for inputting your programs in machine code and six red LEDs as the only display. All the circuitry was exposed. Despite the limitations, I was hooked immediately. I remember punching in machine code to play Hunt the Wumpus. (And, amazingly, chess. Some guy wrote a chess program that fit in 1K.)

In '79 or '80, our school got a TRS-80, which I pretty much took over. I still get a little lump in my throat looking at the old pictures. I still remember playing some of these games, especially Defense Command.

Another fond memory of this time was connecting my dad's dumb terminal to a university computer to play Adventure. Due to the partially disassembled state of the modem, I remember there was an alligator clip we had to attach to a screw when we heard the carrier signal.

Around '82-'83, my dad started bringing home an HP-85 from work. Wow, what fun. It could draw lines for graphics instead of just blocks like the TRS-80. It had a little thermal printer built in, like you see on cash registers.

Shortly thereafter, my dad and I played a ping-pong match with high stakes. If I won, he'd buy a TRS-80 Color Computer for the house. If he won, I'd have to get a job and pay for half. Did he let me win? I'll never know, but he came home with the computer a few days later. Sixteen K of RAM! Color! And a screen as big as whatever TV you plugged it into. What a joy. (I remember a friend of my dad's had one with 32K of RAM. 32K! How could anyone possibly ever use that much? As a point of reference, my new laptop has over 16,000 times as much.)

That was the computer I really learned to program on. My brother and I wrote really good knock-off of Activision's Atari 2600 game Kaboom! in assembly language. I remember we had to shorten our variable names just to be able to load the whole thing into the editor, so I guess I started to realize that maybe 16K wasn't so much.

Thanks for indulging me...