I was five, maybe six when I started fucking about with my Atari 800 - I just played games while listening to Another One Bites The Dust on vinyl repeatedly. The fact that someone took on software owner’s challenges at that time when I was struggling to write my own name brings me immense joy.
Ha! By that time, my parents had sent me to “computer summer camp” as punishment for garbling my dad’s work computer (IIe? IIc?) somehow. By the end of the same summer, I was champing at the byte to go back and clunk in BASIC, Hex, and Pascal for that sweet sweet post-apoc green screen hit of dopamine. Literal magic, all of it, and I knew then I wanted to be a gawdamned wizard.
(FWIW, years later, it was apparent they hadn’t learnt their lesson when they forced me to join the church’s Bible Quiz team wherein us teens memorized entire Gospel books for later use in a jeopardy-ish team battle royale format against other churchs’ teams of hormonal malcontents & blithely saccharine tryhards.)
Oh, and said sibling is apparently about your age. They weren’t as excited that I’d turned their car into a tape-fixer, but then I showed them how to launch a bucket w/ an m80, so we were square. 🤣
fuckin’ hell bro, that’s some PhD shit
The Gordon Freeman of the taking up cassette slack world
(I’m taking the piss, but man this would have halved the time it took to spool back up my old Atari tapes)
You would’ve loved the gadget that pre-teen me epoxied together from a pen body+cap and a sibling’s pullback racecar mechanism.
Wind up the bot, hold the 2nd pen & cassette, and let’er zip that tape back up to cherry new. Tubular. 🤘🏼
Good on you friend, yeeehaa!
I was five, maybe six when I started fucking about with my Atari 800 - I just played games while listening to Another One Bites The Dust on vinyl repeatedly. The fact that someone took on software owner’s challenges at that time when I was struggling to write my own name brings me immense joy.
Good on you dude!
Ha! By that time, my parents had sent me to “computer summer camp” as punishment for garbling my dad’s work computer (IIe? IIc?) somehow. By the end of the same summer, I was champing at the byte to go back and clunk in BASIC, Hex, and Pascal for that sweet sweet post-apoc green screen hit of dopamine. Literal magic, all of it, and I knew then I wanted to be a gawdamned wizard.
(FWIW, years later, it was apparent they hadn’t learnt their lesson when they forced me to join the church’s Bible Quiz team wherein us teens memorized entire Gospel books for later use in a jeopardy-ish team battle royale format against other churchs’ teams of hormonal malcontents & blithely saccharine tryhards.)
Oh, and said sibling is apparently about your age. They weren’t as excited that I’d turned their car into a tape-fixer, but then I showed them how to launch a bucket w/ an m80, so we were square. 🤣