Remarkable how similar this account is to my own experiences. I started programming on the Apple ][+, and quickly began making choose-your-own-adventure style games in Apple Basic. One of my very early games was "Smurf"*.

I wrote Smurf on my friend's machine, and stored it on a audio cassette tape. His father had decided that 5 1/4" floppy disk drives were too expensive, and hooked up an old cassette recorder instead... though he did splurge on a 100 baud modem. Anyway, I graduated to floppies as Apples started appearing in school, but lack of storage space remained a problem.

Thinking back on it, I'm sort of amazed at some of the things I wrote. My mind was so captivated by what I was doing, that I had no problem keeping track of God knows how many lines of totally unstructured code. Eventually, someone showed me subroutines. I thought about them, but soon decided that there was nothing you could do with them that you couldn't do with gotos.

The storage problem kept coming up. I couldn't afford many floppies, and they kept filling up with big games like Lode Runner, Oregon Trail and Karateka. Hence, I had to compress my code. Amongst other things, I recall systematically leaving all unnecessary whitespace out, and numbering my lines 1 2 3 4...

Eventually, though, things went bad. My efforts to make games using hires graphics in basic weren't panning out; they were too slow, and (as I knew nothing about video refresh rates or buffering) they flashed annoyingly. I knew I had to move on to "assembler", whatever that was, but nobody seemed to know how to program assembler.

And then the Macintosh came out. That killed it. The Computer for the Rest of Us shut me out in the cold. It was so cool in so many ways... but how the heck did you program the thing? Where was the prompt? I had no computers I knew how to program, and nobody seemed to know enough to help. My interest died, and I'm rather surprised that I ever wrote code again. Linux brought me back in from the cold.

And Perl made it fun. Perl is, IMHO, the coolest thing thing since Apple Basic. :-)

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* This in itself requires a word of explanation. Today we are in quite a golden age for cartoons. In the early '80s, cartoons were mindless, bland, dreadfully condescending bits of fluff (not unlike most everything on TV). VCRs were for people with money, and it would be years until Robotech introduced people to the sophistication of Anime. So don't be too quick to excoriate what today would be pretty bad stuff. With elements of medieval fantasy and halfway creative art, the Smurfs were comparatively very, very interesting.

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