When I was a kid, I briefly had a friend who built the first computer I ever saw. I long ago forgot the friend's name, but I remember the name he gave the computer: Laurie (after Laurie Partridge, natch). It had one simple Star Trek game that somehow involved acquiring and shooting photon torpedoes. For me, this was a rare moment of true wonder — like Laura Dern seeing dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Or Anthony Michael Hall seeing Kelly LeBrock in Weird Science. You know — total, overwhelming awe.
Clive Thompson's piece in Wired is a love letter to programming in BASIC and, more generally, that era when a rudimentary computer language felt like a journey into a new and exciting future.
I was entering the miseries of seventh grade in the fall of 1980 when a friend dragged me into a dimly lit second-floor room. The school had recently installed a newfangled Commodore PET computer, a squat and angular box that glowed in the corner. "You gotta try this," he told me, and handed over a piece of paper on which he'd handwritten a program.
I plunked it out on the PET's chunky mechanical keyboard.
10 PRINT "CLIVE"
20 GOTO 10
I typed "RUN," hit Enter, and watched as my name spilled down the screen in bright green-on-black text, over and over.
For a 12-year-old in the pre-internet era? This was electrifying. I had typed a couple of commands—ones that seemed easily understandable—and the machine had obeyed. I felt like I'd just stolen fire from Zeus himself.
See what I mean — awe. But then we also grok how quickly this new power can go haywire:
I also realized, studying that tiny two-line program, that it was an infinite loop. The computer would run the code until the sun burned out, or someone unplugged it. There are not many ways, when you're a preteen, to grasp the fabric of infinity. But I'd just done so, thanks to this strangely accessible computer language: BASIC.
Clive's essay goes on to look at how the earliest computer languages evolved.
Beyond rudimentary BASIC, I've never coded in my life. But this really brought me back to that special time when we were dimly aware that we were on the cusp of a revolution, at an inflection point in human history.
