The Computing Life

[vovat]

arfies recently made a post about computer use throughout her life, and I thought I might as well do the same thing. My dad was a computer programmer, which is probably why I was introduced to some elements of computing pretty early on. On the other hand, there are some other elements, like the Internet, where I was somewhat of a latecomer. My family's first computer was a Texas Instruments 99/4A, which operated on cartridges (or, as TI called them, "Solid State Command Modules"). Games we had included TI Invaders (a blatant rip-off of Space Invaders), Hunt the Wumpus, Video-Graphs (a very primitive graphics program), and Video Chess (in which I liked to use the "create a chess scenario" function to give myself, like, three queens, while the computerized opponent wouldn't have any). Eventually, Atari started developing games for the TI, including Jungle Hunt, Shamus, Picnic Paranoia, and Pole Position. I distinctly remember going to Electronics Boutique and buying these games when I was in elementary school. My dad also showed me some BASIC programming. When I was young, the programs he made and I used were typically along the lines of flash cards and pictures of Winnie-the-Pooh. Later, we worked together to make a text adventure where the player fought monsters and retrieved treasures. I also had a dream of making a Pac-Man style game where the enemies would be bees instead of ghosts. I think I got as far as designing the bees and having the game end when one made contact with the playable character. Programming in TI BASIC was annoying, because there was no way to save your work except by using a tape recorder. One of the better games for the TI was an early RPG called Tunnels of Doom, which was largely responsible for garnering my interest in this genre. To play it, you needed to load most of the data from a cassette, and about half the time it wouldn't load properly. It was also dangerously easy to accidentally restart the computer, as it only two keys in combination to do so.

The schools had Apple II computers, as was probably the case for most schools around that time. I remember learning Logo, and using it to draw a house and a golf flag. My favorite Apple game was Word Munchers, which arfies actually mentioned in her post. I was pretty much obsessed with this game for a little while, even making up my own skits and stories involving the Munchers and Troggles. When I was in fourth grade, I wrote a play where I went inside the computer after it fell on the floor and broke open during an earthquake, and then became a Word Muncher. The class (which was quite small) acted out a few scenes, and the teacher videotaped them. I have no idea whether he still has the tape.

I think I might have been in junior high when my dad finally bought a home computer that actually had a hard drive, a floppy drive, and (this was amazing to me at the time) an entire MEGABYTE of memory. {g} We had a few of the Munchers games for that system, including Super Munchers, which was actually pretty difficult in the higher levels. I also had the original SimCity, which was quite frustrating. Unless you disabled disasters, there was an earthquake practically every five minutes. Maybe I'm misremembering, or there was something weird about my copy, but that's what seemed to happen. Even when I DID disable disasters, I still always ran out of money, and the citizens (or Sims, as they called them) didn't want to pay higher taxes. Then there were the Carmen Sandiego games, which were great. (Oddly enough, I never really watched the PBS show.) And my dad used C to program a game of Risk on there.

Since I had had some experience with programming, and I had taken a few high school courses on the subject (mostly using Pascal, but also some C++), I thought I could hack it as a Computer Science major in college. I was wrong. The opening classes were pretty easy for me, but it got really difficult really quickly. I ended up becoming a History major in my junior year, although I had taken enough Computer Science classes to declare it as a minor.

The most exciting part of computing that I was introduced to in college was, of course, the Internet. I had had only minor exposure to it before that, most of it being when I stayed overnight at a frat house at Washington College, while looking at the school. I was so fascinated by the World Wide Web that I spent more time on there, looking up information on Oz and Weird Al (back when the main Al website was at loop.com), than actually checking out the college. While Internet access is taken for granted by many schools nowadays, few if any computers at my school had it. I remember some of my geekier classmates talking about how they used Prodigy, but that was about it. Anyway, I was on the Internet all the time in college (as I am now, really), and I had soon created my own web page, and started posting to newsgroups and e-mail lists. In the summer after my freshman year, my dad got Internet access at home, through AOL. This was back when it got busy signals and Waol errors all the time (as opposed to just running really slowly, and no longer having newsgroup access or a proper quote function in the e-mail, as are the case now).

In other news (if what I've written so far in this entry can be considered "news," which it probably can't), bethje and I watched Starshaped last night. This was a concert/tour video of Blur, back when they were still good. I believe I've mentioned before how I think Blur "jumped the shark" (as they say in the vernacular) around the time of their self-titled album. But the songs they play in the video are great, and how many other tour videos are there where you can see the band members use urinals? :P

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

My first computer was a TI 99/4A, as well. I programmed in BASIC, but I never really knew what I was doing, and didn't save. Example:
10 PRINT "Colleen rocks"
20 GOTO 10
We only had two cartridges for it, a financial organizer and a game for preschool kids (it was for my sister.) We used a tape recorder as a tape drive.

Around Halloween I went to Goodwill, and they had a TI 99/4A for about $10, but it didn't have a power supply or anything, so I didn't get it. It would have been useless, but cool nonetheless. They had cartridges for it, but they were charging $2 a piece, which is highway robbery.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

I forget how much the games cost when I used to buy them. Probably somewhere in the $10-15 range. But that was a long time ago. I do think I remember hearing that my dad paid $250 for the computer, but I could be wrong about that.

[kristenjarrod.livejournal.com]

Your Word Munchers story was the best story ever! My city school system had Apples the entire time I was there. The last computers the school got in before I graduated was the blue imacs.

My first real computer was this IBM PS/2 my dad bought from some guy at work in 1995. I remember I typed up stories with it and played Wolfenstein with it and that was pretty much it.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Your Word Munchers story was the best story ever!

Thanks! I kind of wish I could see that tape again, but I'd probably be really embarrassed. I think I do still have a book of Muncher-related pictures I drew, but they're all pretty bad. I could draw the Munchers, but the Troggles gave me some trouble, and I think I sometimes just represented them with circles and letters standing for their names.

I don't think the iMac had been invented when I graduated from high school. They had Windows PC's for the computer classes I took, although I don't know the actual brand.

I did a lot of typing on my dad's old computer. It had WordPerfect 5.1, which used a lot of hard-to-remember key combinations. There were actually a few ways in which I preferred it to Microsoft Word, though, like how the Tab key would actually work logically.

[rockinlibrarian.livejournal.com]

Ah, so much familiar about the TI 99/4A story! That was really my only experience with video games, which is just sad, but anyway, I LOVED TI Invaders and I was pretty good at it. I was also thinking the other day about Munch Man which was like the opposite of Pac Man (you made a chain cover the maze instead of clearing it of dashes), and how I used to have this strategy for getting through the maze as quickly and undyingly as possible and I was wondering now if that strategy would actually still work if I somehow found a way to play Munch Man again today. My dad wrote this video game about the Smurfs which he saved as you pointed out on a tape recorder-- I don't know how good it was, but the characters actually looked decently enough like Smurfs. Well, they looked like abstract pixelly things, but you could tell they were supposed to represent Smurfs. It's funny nowadays people are on the computers all the time, but everything's DONE for them-- you rarely ever hear of ordinary people messing around with programming anymore. (I remember doing a lot of programs similar to the anonymous poster above!)

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I remember Munch Man. We never had it, but some people my dad knew from work did. The graphics were far inferior to the regular Pac-Man (which eventually did come out for the TI), but I thought it was cool that there were different enemies on each level. TI Invaders actually did that as well, but I haven't played the regular Space Invaders enough to know whether that happened in the original as well.

It's funny nowadays people are on the computers all the time, but everything's DONE for them-- you rarely ever hear of ordinary people messing around with programming anymore.

Yeah, I know. I think it might have something to do with the fact that, when we were young, people didn't expect home computers to do much, so just about any program was impressive. Graphics are a good example. Back when most graphics sucked, you could make something simple and blocky, and it wouldn't be that much worse than what you'd see in a professionally made game. Now, graphics are much better, but you pretty much have to have skill in both programming AND art to produce anything that isn't laughable by modern standards.

[slfcllednowhere.livejournal.com]

SUPER MUNCHERS

What a fab game.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

I liked that you could actually CONTROL the cut scenes, instead of just watching them. That flying-up-the-cliff bit could get really tedious, though.

As far as the regular game went, I think Famous People was always the hardest category for me.