Guided by Ghosts of the Past
For those of a certain age you might remember way back in 1984 or 85 when you stepped in front of a Macintosh for the very first time, and what an utterly new and unworldly experience it was. Moving that strange “mouse” device and watching the pointer on the screen follow it. Seeing all those ants march around the selections you made in MacPaint. Dragging an icon… of a disk… to the trash!
For a small-town kid like me, my first experience with a Mac did for me back then what listening to a good Van Morrison song, or maybe watching Steve Martin playing the Banjo still does for me today. It moved my soul in all the right places.
Lately, like a lot of people in my generation seem to be doing, I’ve been collecting other things from my past that had that same kind of effect on me. Now, in eyeshot of my desk while I work on my 64 bit, 32 GB, 10-core MacBook Pro, I can get inspired again by things that shaped my view of what state-of-the-art technology was like way back then.
There is still a lot to learn from all that thirty and forty year old technology.
A view from my desk.
Igniting a Kid’s Imagination
Seeing my first Macintosh definitely switched something on inside my brain, but I really have to go back even further, to 1979, playing Adventure on my Atari, for my first real experience with mind-bending software.
Hiding from the dragon.
I was too young to get it at the time. I only knew I wanted to keep playing it over and over until I wore out the joystick... and my family’s nerves.
But the developer, Warren Robinett, had figured out how to turn clunky blocks of color into something that actually made you feel fear, and made you think you were seeking real treasure and fighting real dragons. If that isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.
From “The Art of Atari” by Tim Lapetino
It wasn’t until later, of course, that I understood how good Atari had been at marketing and packaging those blocky pixel games. Simple, multi-color boxes with beautiful illustrations on the covers.
They clearly understood screenshots wouldn’t cut it, so they created iconic artwork for us to imagine what those blocky pixels were. And boy did it work on my young, impressionable mind. I could stare at that ship blasting Asteroids for hours, and it became exactly what I saw in my minds eye when I was playing the game.
Atari understood the value of a good out-of-the-box experience, and knew how important kids’ imagination would be to the success of their so-called “video computer system game programs.”
I still think of how Atari’s game boxes and packaging made me feel back then as I aspire to make the best first impressions with my own apps today.
Learning the Machine’s Language
In the dark ages, before the Internet, a kid had to go out and find copies of paper magazines like Compute!’s Gazette to catch up on the latest for his Vic-20 or Commodore 64. Those magazines, to a kid learning computers for the first time, had as much soul as any issue of Life Magazine ever had. Like the Internet, each issue was packed with things you could learn, especially if you put in the hours (and hours) of typing in the hundreds and hundreds of lines program listings inside each issue.
There were games, budget planners, checkbook managers, and more that were written in BASIC to type in and learn from, but it was those mystical, magical Machine Language listings that blew my mind the most.
How could entering in page after page of simple integer numbers between 0 and 255 produce a high-speed, arcade game like Spike, or a commercial-quality word processor like SpeedScript? It became one of the great mysteries of the universe I had to understand. Things like binary, 6502 mnemonics, 2’s compliment, and video-chips hard-wired to RAM, became as fascinating and elusive to me as Dark Matter.
My quest to understand Machine Language also introduced me to the importance of good developer tools. Entering in long streams of binary numbers to get free arcade games was one thing, but having a good Assembler was like having a set of professional-grade carpenter tools in your garage to build anything you wanted.
Discovering tools like these made me start to see how I could actually make a living as a programmer.
It may also be why I love native app development, now, more than cross-platform solutions like React Native or Flutter. Native apps are our modern version of Machine Language, letting us speak more closely with the machine.
That Constant Quest to Improve
The Vic-20’s 23 column text display.
Today, we all look forward to the next year’s model of phone or a lighter and faster laptop, but can you ever remember wanting more text columns? It’s difficult, today, to imagine how that was once a thing.
But take the old Vic-20, for example. It only came with just 23 columns of text you could work with! What could you possibly do with that? The Timex Sinclair had 32. A little better. The Atari, Apple II, and Commodore 64 all had 40 columns. Now we’re talking. But, of course, “real” computers, like the IBM PC, had 80 columns. That’s what all the cool kids had.
Then, of course, Apple came along and turned all of our ideas about computers (and text columns) completely upside down when they introduced their Macintosh.
The commercial was legendary, of course, but for me it was their brochure printed in December of 1983 that I remember the most. For a high school kid, from a working-class family, who had no hope of ever owning such a computer, that brochure was the closest you could come to holding a Macintosh in your hands. I remember paging through it for weeks trying to understand anything and everything I could from those 12 glossy pages. It was easy to see at that point, even from a brochure, that the future of computers was going to be one heck of a ride.
Fortunately, my parents were the best of champions a kid could ask for. Despite how strange and utterly expensive my interests must have been for them, they were the reason I had an Atari 2600 to experience the fear and thrill of Adventure on, a Vic-20 to want more columns from, and a Commodore 64 to discover the magic of binary bits with.
Then, before I graduated from high school, they relented to my constant pleas once more with a Macintosh 512K (the Fat Mac), and that sealed my fate. I’ve been happily earning a living on one Mac or another ever since.
I certainly wouldn’t want to go back and relive any of those years again, as fun as they were. (The anticipation, alone, of having to wait for technology to evolve all over again would be too much.) But taking a moment, from time to time, to revisit and understand all the passion, creativity, and thought that developers were able to squeeze out of those tiny 8 and 16 bits of technology so long ago, it inspires me to write better software with all the seemingly unlimited bits of technology that we have available to us today.
And I’m reminded, all over again, why I love doing what I do.