Remembering where I started

Today I want to go down memory lane a little bit. This week there is no project, but instead a look back to a piece of my early geek-hood. This goes back to the very early days of my computer use. Back to the beginning of home computers.

For most people my age, this goes back to the Commodore 64, and the Vic 20 computer. For me, it was the Atari 800XL. I had saved up a hundred dollars and wanted to buy my first computer, having only ever seen them in my grade eight class. We used it to play a text-based game called Lemonade, the goal of which was to figure out the correct blend of water, sugar and lemons, and set a price per cup that would keep people buying your lemony goodness. Obviously this game was AWESOME!

I took my hundred dollars and went to Toys-R-Us to purchase my first 8-bit computer. My choice was the Atari 800XL. It was ninety nine dollars, and it was soon in my hands as I walked home. I bought it on a Friday. I remember this, because the next day my family was taking a trip to Canada's Wonderland. For those unfamiliar, it's an amusement park near Toronto, Canada. It's full of roller-coasters, and various other rides and goodies. I remember this so well, because as much as I LOVED going to Wonderland when I was a kid, after having plugged in my new computer into my 12 inch black and white TV for only a few short hours, I had decided that I wanted to stay home alone that weekend to sit and play with my new toy!

This was huge! I could not stop playing with this new computer. The crazy thing is, that there was almost nothing to it. It was 48K, and a built in BASIC language interpreter, and that's all. No storage of any kind, no games, no software, just the word READY with a little boxy cursor sitting under the R.

The computer was turned on, and was READY for whatever I wanted to do next. Which meant learning to program in BASIC.

Obligatory first code

READY
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD ";
20 GOTO 10
RUN

HELLO WORLD HELLO WORLD HELLO WORLD HELLO WORLD
HELLO WORLD HELLO WORLD HELLO WORLD HELLO WORLD
HELLO WORLD HELLO WORLD HELLO WORLD HELLO WORLD

I spend the next year or so learning how to create my own software, which I had to save by writing it down by hand! If I turned off the computer I had to re-type my code again. This got old - fast.

My next purchase was a cassette tape drive. It was used, and only thirty dollars. Now I could save my code to blank cassette tapes. These were very exciting times for me.

As time ticked by, I slowly purchased every accessory I could find, a printer, a modem, a 5 1/4" floppy drive. There were hard drives available in those days, but it was crazy expensive for a 20 MB drive and I just didn't have the money. But I dreamed of one day owning it. I mean, with 20 MB, I could save every application I had, and would have plenty of room for anything else I could download at 300 baud.

So what has prompted me to cruse down memory lane you might be asking. Well, a while back I was walking through a second hand store and came across a little piece of my past. It was the single little device that opened the whole world to me, one BBS at a time. It was the same make an model of my very first Modem. It even had the manual with it! This was the 300 Baud Pocket Modem as distributed by BOT Engineering. The same modem that I purchased for about a hundred dollars, back in the day, before I even knew who to call. I asked the salesman at the computer store for a number to call with my new modem. Luckily he had one, and that began my very slow journey into cyberspace.

My very first chat online was between me and the SYSOP of a local BBS (Bulletin Board System). I was so excited that I was having a conversation with another human over the modem, that I ran to get my entire family to come and see this marvel of technology! We were all very impressed, and I knew that using computers was how I wanted to spend the rest of my life. It sounds sorta silly now, but back in those days, this was all amazing technology, that regular people had not really seen or played with before.

With that modem I became a hacker and didn't even know it. I, like many, if not all of you, had just recently watched "War Games". That movie gave me the idea that I could write a program that could call every phone number in my city, and look for modems to answer - AKA War-dialing. I had no idea this was what I was doing. To me I was just looking for other computers to call.

This was actually pretty easy code to write. The manual for my modem had some example code which demonstrated how to write software to make a modem call. I remember that the biggest concept that I had to wrap my head around was that this was a pulse dialing modem and that I could not have it tone dial. I had to pulse or quickly hang-up and pick-up the phone in quick succession to dial a number. Once I realized this, I just had to create some FOR loops, and have the code keep track of which numbers answered with a modem tone.

This code worked, and thank God that back then, no one had call display!

I bought that modem from the second hand store and it now sits on my bookshelf as a reminder of both my youth, and those early, innocent days of computers. And... no Internet!