Fixing a hole where the rain gets in

One of the joys of getting older is that we get a sense of having lived through some history.

The other night in the place where I hang out sometimes, the folks were talking about the computers and video games they remember from childhood. I laughed. I have played Super Pong on the original set, this would have been around 1976. At least I'm pretty sure that was the model I played. (2 players, 4 games.)

But, it got me to thinking about the old computers I have used. I looked around a bit, to find the first computer I ever used. The first thing that came to mind because of the context was the old HP 3000. The context was computers and games, and I remember that even then a huge portion of my time on computers was spent playing games.

The HP 3000 was an early HP minicomputer that used a 16 bit operating system called MPE. Bob Green has written an informative history of HP 3000. I learned to write BASIC programs on this computer in 1978 in the Fairfax County Virginia public schools. I also learned to play Star Trek.

I searched Google and found a nearly original copy of the source code of Star Trek by Mike Mayfield, which is an early character based computer game. Even though it is character based, some of the output is meant to represent crude graphic displays. You may be interested to read Michael Birken's article about the history of the Star Trek program and the re-written C source code.

But even before the HP 3000, I remember Barry Sperling, who was also the Chess Club advisor, teaching us in his 7th grade algebra class to write simple programs on the HP 9810A. This was in essence a desktop programmable calculator with three memory locations, (x,y, and z). You had to use two memory registers to perform math, so that really left only one memory register for "long term" storage. I vaguely remember some convolutions involved in moving things between registers, and of course since it was an HP product, this is where I learned about RPN.

It's probably boring to most people, but to people like myself who are fascinated by computing and its effect on humanity, these were formative times, and I am glad for the perspective experiencing them has offered me.