Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Want to feel some nostalgia for the first mind-blowing experience of home computing you ever had? You know, back when a deciding factor for a system was how many K of RAM it had (as in, up to 16K or some such number), whether you could use an Atari joystick with it, and how good its games were? If so, this is the place for you.

My first computer was the VIC-20. Yup - - the fabled machine of 5K (only 3.5 of which was usable), a screen display of twenty-two characters. Five minutes of loading games from the tape deck. Cutting my programming teeth on code like this:

10 PRINT "BITE ME"
20 GET A$:IF A$=""THENGOTO20
30 PRINT "BITE ME AGAIN"
40 GOTO10

I had a lot of fun with that clunky thing…but then there was the technological revolution of the Commodore 64, the machine with a lot more memory (64K!), sprite graphics (which were a huge pain-in-the-ass to program, but there it was) and a 40-character per line display! Zap! Pow!!

I grew up in a home computing environment such that, when Macintosh came along and I learned that one doesn't simply turn it on and start typing in BASIC programs, I thought, "Then what the hell do you do with it? Sounds useless! And that 'mouse' thing is friggin' stupid!" Little did I know.

Sir Matt the Easily Devoured by Dragons owned a TI99-4A computer, if memory serves. Many a classroom argument resulted of our arguing over which was a superior system. It offended his sense of design, already potent in the fifth grade, that the VIC-20 should have the slot for cartridges (remember, ROM-cartridges were the main vehicle for games and such back then) located in the back of the computer, and he maybe had a point, but in any event those arguments now seem rather like the scene in Stand By Me when Gordo and Vern debate whether Mighty Mouse could defeat Superman.