Zaphod: May 14, 2004

As soon as I saw this picture of the book cover, taken from this Web site featuring old computer books (found via the Boing Boing blog), it took me right back, and I remembered.

I remembered this book, I remembered scrupulously typing in and saving my first BASIC programs, and I remembered my first-ever computer. Twenty years ago. I would type in BASIC the way I type in HTML today, automatically. Oh my God... LINE NUMBERS. How long has it been since we all typed in line numbers in our programs??

My first computer, a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III, in a moulded plastic grey all-in-one case, with a whopping 16 kilobytes of RAM, a 300-baud acoustic coupler modem, and a tape recorder as a storage device. I called it Zaphod, after Zaphod Bebblebrox in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was 1984, I was still listening to the Buggles, and I was twenty years old (half a lifetime ago now) and a student-quasi-automaton in my second year of computer science at the University of Manitoba. I don't know quite why I wanted the TRS-80 Model III so much, but I *WANTED* one. I still remember this weird sense of pride when we picked it up at the Radio Shack in the local mall. As if I knew people were going to think I was a geek, but I didn't care... I had a PERSONAL COMPUTER and they didn't nyah-nyah.

And I would futz with VERY low-res (128x48 monochrome) TRS-80 BASIC graphics programs, change a bit to see what happened, make programs that would accept words and write my own computer-generated poetry, tinker endlessly with the Hello program in an effort to make it understand what I was typing, to be my own listening partner. Oh yeah, total geek all right. Trying to program a friend.

I used that TRS-80 (my fellow students would jokingly call it the "Trash-80") to dial into the University of Manitoba. I remember dialing the phone, waiting for the screech, putting the handset into the coupler. I remember forgetting that I was still online when I picked up the other phone and broke the connection. I remember the hassle of trying to type and read 80-character lines on a 64-character wide screen. BASIC led to PASCAL led to COBOL... we CompSci students all used to joke that we had to learn COBOL so that we could get a job with Safeway.

And in 1984 I remember picking up a glossy white brochure from a display booth at the university and reading all about the new personal computer from Apple, and thinking "Wow, a graphical interface...no white phosphor letters on black".

It's funny how that geek resurfaced only so very recently, only when he started tinkering about with installing MoveableType on some spare UNIX space over the Christmas holidays twenty years later. Taking pride in remembering to set the proper UNIX file permissions. It's funny how things sometimes return back to where they started. That sense of wonder is still there.