My First Computer Game
OK, so not a Timex Sinclair 1000 but still nostalgic... I managed to get my parents to splurge on a TRS-80 ("Trash 80") as an "educational device" (not a toy) back in 1981 when I was still in primary school. My big sister (six years my elder) was taking night computer courses at Boston University and so we bought a modem so that she could dial into their PDP-10. I soon figured out where she kept her password and spent hours playing "adventure"... when I finally got a Commodore 64 a few years later, the first games I bought (OK, downloaded from a pirate BBS) were the Infocom games as opposed to the flashy graphics games, which were WAY more engaging. I remember spending almost 48 hours straight solving "Planetfall". But try and tell that to kids these days...
I did manage to teach myself BASIC from the manual included with the TRS-80, the start of a long and satisfying career. My sister also has spent her whole career coding. I think she made it in just before the home computer industry decided that computers were "toys for boys" and began marketing exclusively to boys. Most of the jobs I worked in the early days had a very healthy (even by today's standards) mix of gender among the programmers, but that was a window that soon closed, unfortunately.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
