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• Thursday, September 14, 2006 03:38 AM

  Learned on the C64 and, yes, grew up to be a programmer

  Man, this article hit home. I could not believe it when I saw the title; right away I knew exactly what it was going to be about as I have had these thoughts for so long. In the seventh grade at a private school, one of the parents wanted to teach a computer class. So he asked who was interested. I went to check it out and he said we would need to get a Commodore 64. I went home and told my dad, "We need a Commodore 64 for this computer class at school". It really didn't occur to me whether or not we should get one - the teacher said that is what we needed and that was good enough for me. Fortunately, my dad didn't even balk at this and he got me one. We programmed all sorts of things, from little algorithms all the way up to a database to track movies. We even played around with the 2D sprites (little graphics that you can move around the screen) and the built-in sounds that you could use to make music. Just letting us play around with that helped us learn logic. And I think doing that at that age is important. They say your brain is still forming, and I believe that doing these exercises while your brain is still developing prepares you better. Anyway, that lasted a couple years and I went to a public high school and didn't do too much with computers besides using my C64 here and there.

  We had the C64 for a while (my dad was even using the C64 for writing things up for his work, and power fluctuations would sometimes make him lose what he was working on). Finally, relatives convinced him that it was just a "toy" and he needed to get a real computer. An IBM compatible PC. So we did. I remember turning it on and seeing the black screen with the C:\ prompt. I tried typing basic commands; of course nothing worked. My uncle finally got it through to me that the only thing I could do was change directories or run existing programs. I was anticipating that this much newer computer would be able to do so much more. So I wanted to see graphics. It was EGA (16 color) and actually another uncle thought that was overkill and we should have just gotten CGA (4 color). There was no builtin support for sprites and so I was not finding anything that animated like my C64. Fine, let's hear some sound. Oh, you can't do that without getting a sound card. By then I was getting pretty disillusioned with this PC concept. Since then I have never found the PC to be as inviting as my C64 that you could just turn on and program.

  I went to college and learned FORTRAN and C++. Now I program in Visual Basic and Python and create web pages with ASP, link them to Oracle with packages/procedures in PL/SQL and create dynamic web pages that query the data and display the results using SVG that is updated without needing page refreshes using AJAX. But no matter what language I use, they all boil down to having : IF this THEN do that, DO this UNTIL that, etc. Sure you can make things object oriented and more elegant, but the fundamentals are still the same.

  I don't know if I would have been as computer oriented without my experience with the Commodore 64 and I feel sorry that other kids don't get this type of exposure. I will always be grateful that that one parent decided to get some kids together and show us the world of BASIC on the Commodore 64.

  —vdo
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