Re: For the fun of it

["Matt J. McCullar" <mccullar@flash.net>]

I had a similar experience.  My father was an engineer for the power company
in downtown Fort Worth, and when I was a little kid once in a while (usually
during the summer) I'd spend a day with him at the office.  I distinctly
remember sitting down at a terminal at a big mainframe computer down in the
basement; I don't know the model number or even the manufacturer...  The
power company used it for billing, I believe.  But one terminal (keyboard
and printer ONLY!  No video monitor) was programmed to play _Star Trek_.
This may have been 1976, 1977...  I couldn't have been eight years old.  I
didn't even know what the command "self-destruct" meant!  :)  "Try it," my
dad advised.

4...  3....  2.... 1....   BOOM!

All of the results were printed on fanfold paper, and I played about four or
five rounds of the game.  Never won it.  :)

That may have been the very first time I ever got my hands on a computer.
If that wasn't it, then it may have been at a Radio Shack store in 1977 when
the TRS-80 came out.  I never owned one, but I sure played with them in the
stores.

I know for sure I played games on a TRS-80 (I forget which model number) in
the sixth grade, which would have been 1980 or so.  My math class had one.
This was in Fort Worth, again, home base for Tandy, so many public schools
had TRS-80 machines.  Later on, in the 7th grade at a different school,
another math class had a Commodore PET, but we absolutely never used it (it
was broken most of the time); I never even saw it turned on.  In high school
(1983-1986), there were plenty of TRS-80 Model III's, and even some PC
clones.

Those Model III's were interesting to tinker with because I recall spending
a lot of time trying to get programs from David Ahl's _BASIC Computer Games_
to run on them.  Sometimes I was able to "translate" a certain dialect of
BASIC from its original form into something that the TRS-80 would
understand, but not always.  There was one program that I was never able to
get running, but a couple of my classmates did; it was the one that allowed
you to type in a word or a sentence, and then it would scroll that message
across the screen in gigantic letters, like you were looking at a news
ticker on a big electronic scoreboard.  I could never get BASIC "Star Trek"
to run, either.

It's terrible that I can't remember the first computer I ever owned.  It may
have been the Tandy 1000 (a PC clone that I ran Word Perfect on), or the
Tandy Color Computer.  I bought the CoCo used simply because I wanted to
learn assembly language programming, using William Barden's book and the
assembler cartridge.  That computer eventually caught fire (literally!)
while it was sitting on my bed and I happened to see and smell smoke
barrelling out of it.  I eventually found out that Radio Shack put the power
switch on the secondary of the CoCo's transformer; therefore, as long as the
power cord was plugged in, it was consuming power whether the switch was on
or not!  Damn lucky I happened to be there at the time, or who knows what
might have happened.