nanowrimo2020
Chapter 1
I open my eyes and look around the room. I can see it’s already morning as light floods the room in a pomegranate hue. Star Wars toys litter the floor mixed with dirty clothes and candy wrappers. My homework untouched since I spread it out on Friday night. I look to the ceiling and watch the plywood pterodactyl model gently spin in the breeze of the open window. I rub my eyes and stretch in bed knocking the copy of Omni magazine folded open to an advertisement. Before sitting up I take the add that fulled my electronic dreams.
Captain Kirk, arm out-stretched was introducing me to the future. He wisely remarks, “Why buy just a video game?, For under 300 dollars get the Commodore Vic-20 the wonder computer of the 1980” My sister and I had a video game. The Atari 2600. We had a number of cartridges and joy stick and paddle controllers . But it did not have a keyboard. There was the option for some number pads but we did not have them. Our video game unlike the Intellivision and some others was just a game. We had no way to create, we cold only play. There was famously a cartridge called basic programming for the 2600 but was difficult to find. I had only ever seen it in catalogs. I had never once seen it in Target or the basement of Sears. Now don’t get me wrong. I loved my 2600. It came with bundled with tank battle and my sister and I would happily play for hours. And we could even get our step dad to play Night Driver a driving simulation that for its sparse graphics elicited a very convincing feeling of driving along a twisting highway on a moonless night. Last year I got one of my favorite games Space Invaders. This game unlike tank battle you could play by on your own. As well as with a friend or in my case a sister. The box had a deceptive image of the game play . But no one really cared as they knew the game play from the arcade. My friends and I all had the marching aliens burned into our retinas and or scribbled in our math note books . It was in this process of drawing the aliens on graph paper that I really internalized pixels. The ultimate in coloring in the lines. The play was engaging and frustrating. The biggest reason is there was no way to win. Aliens always win. They will always land on you and with a computerized distorted fart. It was a lesson in acceptance and an illustration that the any fight is worthy even if it is a lost cause. Although you couldn’t beat the game, you could get a high score. If you did it would not hold it in memory like on the arcade games. We would take a picture of it with our Polaroid camera. I had one high score captured this way. The photo hangs on the cork bard on the wall. I had my sister take it and I am making a funny face next to the Grandma’s Zenith TV with my head between the rabbit ears.
Just last week we got Asteroids. Like Space Invaders we were already intimately familiar with the game play from arcades, bowling allies and bars. Asteroids did not translate to the 2600 as well as space invaders did. The smooth lines of the green vector graphics were replaced by squares from our math graph paper like pixels. But I could still play alone and imagine my self to be Han Solo navigating my way through a deep space belt of asteroids. These games reflected the dreams of my youth for alien contact and flying in a ship through space. Although I would have preferred a more friendly meeting and a less dangerous voyage. But one game that reflected the fears of all of us was missile command. Here you needed to intercept nuclear bombs targeting our cities with a mid air explosion. Like the other games there was no way to win you must accept that you are going to lose. You are going to die. Everyone is going to die. It too was colorful pixels.
I could control these pixels within the limits of the game. I could weave my tank through the maze in Tank Battle. I could move my ship to the left and right in space invaders. I could fly my ship over the doughnut of a playing field in Asteroids. I could place mid air bombs on the screen in Missile Command. But there was a limit to my control. I wanted more control.
This was the reason the reason the advertisement was folded open. This was the reason I was reading every word of its text. Analyzing the picture carefully to try and understand this computer.
The first and most obvious part that would allow greater control was the keyboard. We had a portable typewriter at home. My sister and I would play, sometimes bashing our hands on most of the keys at one jamming them together before they hit the paper. Or even more fun, repeatedly hitting the space bar until the carriage bell rang. Then we would abruptly smack the carriage return back to the starting position. It was behavior like this that gave our mother second thoughts about investing in any thing too expensive.
The only other thing with keys in the house was the Texas instruments calculator. We treated that with a bit more care. Our mother saw to that. The calculator had a sleek black shell and red LED display. It reminded me of Darth Vader’s helmet or a model of a shuttle craft from the distant future. It came with a wonderful book Math on Keys book. The calculator was a couple of years old and the style of the book was firmly in the seventies. Although this was cutting edge technology the book was illustrated with block print pictures that seemed to come from ancient texts. My sister and I looked through the book with reverence like it was a bible. It had some exercise that were accessible to children. But an important part of the book was instruction on how to enter the commands. The order was very important.
So here in bed looking at this add I feel degrees of freedom opening up through the key board.
Looking closer at the photo I could clearly see a tape player. We had a tape player too. My grandpa gave us the tape player just last year. He had gotten the tape player to record messages for us when we moved out of state. Our tape player had a built in microphone and buttons for play, stop, record, fast forward and rewind. With a blank tape we would have hours of fun recording noises or trying to record conversations secretly, telling scary stories or just singing off tune. I had also recorded the audio of one of my favorite movies from the television, stopping and starting for most commercial breaks.
But this computer tape recorder wasn’t for that. It was to store information. Games and programs.
Computer tape was a common collocation in the seventies. If some one said the word ‘computer’ it’s a good chance they would say ‘tape’ next. Computers tapes in TV and the movies were reel to reel. They were large silver and black wheels spinning right and left complete with associating beeping and flashing of bulbs. It was no stretch for a young mind to instantly understand the use of the small cassette tape player here next to this home computer.
So there you have it, a keyboard and a tape player on a desk. That’s the computer. And just like the our video game it used the family’s TV. And here is yet another thing I will need. We had three TV’s in our house one in the living room and one in the Basement for the kids. We had a small black and white TV that my sister and I shared but in my dreams I really need a new TV too.
So again I review the advertisement. The Vic 20 is more than a game. This will allow me more control. I can now choose what pixels I put on the screen and where to put them. I can control the inputs to the computer. I can tell the computer what to do. But how can you do that? I had a some idea at the time. An idea largely formed from popular culture and shows on PBS. There is a way to talk to computers. I you use a language. The chance to actually talk to a computer was for me a first contact. This was my chance to interact with a computer brain. It was really every bit as exciting as the a magical ability to talk to animals or contact with an alien intelligence . This conversation would give me the power to control pixels, to make models of the world. Models of my mind. Like the snap-tight model of the human body or a jet fighter. I would have control of the world on the screen just as I was loosing control of the world around me.
Oh yes, why was I wasting all this time on a Monday morning daydreaming of computer interaction. It was in part because it was my first day at a new school. Having only Captain Kirk in my head and a Star Wars lunch box I was to head out into a difficult world of strange new names and new interactions. Oh yes I forgot to mention I didn’t do the preassigned math homework.