CLIVE THOMPSON writing for Wired:
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.
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.
I had a similar experience when I was 9 and one of my uncles purchased a Texas Instruments TI-99 / 4a machine. It was the summer of 1983 and one hot summer afternoon - I sneaked up to my cousin’s room and entered the following:
1 2 | |
And here is the output - you can try it yourself on a web based TI-99/4a emulator:
Those 2 initial command lines set forth an entire generation of coders that built the modern internet.