Guided by Ghosts of the Past
For those of a certain age you may remember back in the 80s when you stepped in front of a Macintosh for the very first time, and what an utterly new and unworldly experience it was back then. Moving that odd “mouse” device and watching an arrow on that tiny black and white screen follow it. Seeing ants march around selections you made in MacPaint… with a “lasso.” Dragging an “icon” of a disk… to the trash!
For a small-town kid like me, that first experience with a Mac had lifted my hopes for the world like seeing Steve Martin play banjo or watching a Michael Kiwanuka music video does today.
A view from my desk.
Lately (like a lot of people in my generation seem to be doing) I’ve been gathering a few other things from my past that had that same kind of effect on me. Now, beyond my desk while I work on my 64 bit, 32 GB, 10-core MacBook Pro, I can get inspired again by seeing things that shaped my view of what state-of-the-art technology had once been.
Surprisingly, there is still a lot to learn from all that thirty and forty year old technology.
Igniting a Kid’s Imagination
Seeing my first Macintosh definitely switched something on inside my young brain, but I’d 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 terrifying 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).
With his game, Warren Robinett had figured out how to turn big, chunky blocks of bright 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 actual magic, I don’t know what is.
From “The Art of Atari” by Tim Lapetino. Check it out. It’s a beautiful homage to the artists behind the illustrations.
The Out-of-Box Experience
It wouldn’t be until later that I’d understand how good Atari had been at marketing and packaging those pixel-challenged games. Bright, multi-color boxes with beautiful illustrations on the covers were all it took to draw kids like me in.
Box illustration.
Gameplay screenshot. (Taken from AtariAge.com)
Atari understood the idea of out-of-box experience, as much as they knew how important kids’ imaginations would be to their success. Screenshots of blocky pixels wouldn’t be enough, so they created iconic packaging and game manuals for us to imagine what those big pixels were. And boy did it work on my young, impressionable mind. I could stare at that ship on the Asteroids game box for hours, and it became exactly what I saw in my mind’s eye when I was playing the game.
A sample of the colors and images used for the original Atari 2600 game boxes.
I still think about how all those Atari boxes made me feel back then as I aspire to make the best first impressions with my own software 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 once had. And much like the Internet, each issue was packed with all kinds of things you could learn—all written by a passionate and thriving community of writers and contributors. All you had to do was put in hours (and hours, and hours) of typing in the thousands (and thousands) of lines of program listings that were printed inside each issue.
Typing in thousands of numbers gave you free high-quality games, word processors and spreadsheets!
There were simple games, sound editors, budget planners, checkbook managers, and more written in BASIC to type in and learn from, but it was those mystical, magical Machine Language listings that blew our minds.
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 needed to understand. Things like binary, 6502 mnemonics, 2’s compliment, and video-chips hard-wired to RAM, all became as fascinating and elusive to me as Dark Matter.
A popular Machine Language monitor for the 64, and Atari’s assembler cartridge for their 400 and 800 computers.
My quest to understand Machine Language was where I first learned the importance of having good developer tools. Entering in long streams of binary numbers to get free arcade games was great, but having a good Assembler was like being a carpenter with a garage full of power tools. You could build whatever you wanted!
Using some of those tools for the first time 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, today, more than cross-platform solutions like React Native or Flutter. Programming in Swift and Kotlin is like our modern version of Machine Language, letting us speak more closely with the machine.
That Constant Quest to Grow and Improve
Today, we all look forward to the next phone, new wearables, or a lighter and faster laptop, but can you ever remember wanting more text columns? It’s hard to imagine that was ever a thing.
The Vic-20’s twenty-three column text screen.
Commodore’s first commercially successful computer, the VIC-20, only came with 23 columns of text for you to work with. What could you possibly do with that?
The Timex Sinclair had 32. The Atari, Apple II, and Commodore 64 all had 40 columns. That was better. But, of course, “real” computers, like the IBM PC, had 80 columns. Now that was state-of-the-art.
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.
Their commercial was legendary, of course, but for me it was their brochure first printed in December of 1983 that I remember the most. For an average high school kid who had no real 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 twenty-three 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 odd 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 Machine Language with.
Then, before I graduated from high school, they did the unimaginable, giving me a Macintosh 512K (the Fat Mac), and my fate was forever sealed. I’ve been happily earning a living on one Mac or another ever since.
As fun as they were, I certainly wouldn’t want to go back and relive any of those years again (or put my parents through it all, once more). 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 engineers 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 we have available to us today.
Plus, I’m reminded all over again why I love doing what I do.