POST // 002 - First Contact

The summer that we moved I got out into the neighborhood and started to meet all the new kids, feel them out, and started figuring out who I was going to be friends with. We'd spend the days playing in the massive oval cut into the deep woods. We spent time in tree forts, playing Super Mario Bros., Metroid, and The Legend of Zelda. It was also the kind of neighborhood where almost every house seemed to have something interesting in it. Nintendo was everywhere, and computers weren't particularly unusual. I didn't think anything of it at the time. It was just what was around us.

Eventually, I started spending most of my time with my neighbor Karl and his younger brother Eric. We had a lot of things in common. We both liked Nintendo, Legos, computers, and just goofy humor.

Somewhere along the way my parents had picked up a Panasonic W1500 word processor. I remember playing with it before we moved, but now that it was in the office of our new house, it seemed more interesting and my parents seemed less protective of it. It had a cool, dark, sleek look to it, with a techy screen and cool keyboard with some different colored buttons. There was a built-in printer that made a ton of noise when you printed anything. It was easy to use and I learned how to run it pretty quickly.

I liked to turn on the word processor, put my 3.5" floppy disk in, and write my "spy" reports, update mission documents, and track enemy movements. No intelligence agency is worth anything unless they have good technology and I was starting to fall behind.

My dad came home one day with an Apple IIe. I couldn't even begin to explain where it came from, but it went into the office. The word processor moved to the top of a small shelf to the right of the desk and the new computer got the full desk workspace.

Before this, my computer experience was from the computer lab at our elementary school where I loved playing Oregon Trail, Odell Lake, Number Munchers, and all of those other fun games MECC created. But here in our house was the same basic computer that was used in schools. I doubt I asked any real questions. I just wanted to fire it up and play with it. I remember when my dad brought home our first microwave oven. This was way cooler than that.

I spent the rest of the day helping my dad clean the office and get the computer set up. I got the cords plugged in and got the monitor situated. It looked like a professional workspace.

It was the moment of truth, time to boot it up. I flipped the switch and heard the floppy drive come alive, clicking and chattering as the computer tried to read it. It sounded like something was happening... and yeah... the screen was black with a little ] prompt sitting there, waiting for me to do something.

I thought, "This isn't fun! Where are all the fun games? What am I supposed to do now!?"

It was very disappointing and my dad just kinda shrugged and handed me a box of floppy disks and was like, "Good luck!"

I spent a little more time on it that day but got frustrated and just walked away. Eventually, I asked around at school and read through the printed material that came with it enough to figure out how to type commands and get programs running. We had Lemonade Stand, a card game, and a few other gems. There were a few games in big fancy boxes that were fantasy games, but I could never figure out how to get them to run.

Soon after we got the computer my uncle, who worked for a large defense company at the time, heard about how much I liked computers and how I was always using it. Soon after that I started getting computer magazines in the mail that he had sent me.

These magazines were full of information that I knew nothing about. I struggled my way through them, not really understanding a lot of it, but one of the things that piqued my curiosity was the blocks of code at the bottom of some of the pages.

I had learned enough to know that the Apple could drop me into BASIC and that you could write your own code there. Each time a new magazine showed up I would spend hours typing in the code from the blocks and crossing my fingers that one of these times it was going to do something.

Each time, right before I tried to execute the code, I could see the program running some glorious application that would blow my mind.

That never happened.

The code never ran and there was never an earth-shattering application that launched. To this day I wonder if that code was even BASIC or if it was something completely different.

After Desert Shield started my uncle spent some time in Saudi Arabia. I remember watching the news the first week that he was there. He'd call and talk to my dad from the balcony of his hotel room. After he came back the magazines stopped, but I was still plugging away at the code snippets and games.

While we were running Apple, my neighbors had a PC running DOS and Windows 3.0. Most of the time Karl and I spent on the computer was in Windows, playing games and digging through all the clip art and sound files we found on there. I have no idea where any of it came from. Someone must have loaded it from a floppy disk at some point, but to us it was just there.

One of the games we found was Leisure Suit Larry. We'd play it every now and then, even though I'm pretty sure we weren't supposed to. It had some questionable content and we'd laugh and give each other shocked looks as we made Larry walk around and interact with things in his world.

This was also the first time I'd really seen DOS. Karl knew his way around it a little and I started learning some of the commands to move around the computer, find things, and launch programs.

Karl and I started spending more and more time together. We'd hang out late into the night watching movies and TV, playing pool in his basement, sitting around talking about random stuff, or laughing at The Simpsons. Sometimes we'd sneak around the neighborhood late at night and move people's driveway statues. We were always looking for cool new tech or the next great laugh.