My first computer

I must have been 15 years old when I got my first computer. It was the year 1983, I was in my third year of High School. Michael Jackson and Prince were fighting for dominance on the radio, while an aging Roger Moore seemed to have traded in his license to kill for a license to make cheesy, innuendo-filled jokes in ‘Octopussy’.

It was also the year of ‘War Games’, a movie in which a teenager uses his computer skills to hack into a military mainframe. He thinks he is playing a virtual war game against the computer – only realizing when it’s almost too late that his computer opponent is carrying out all the war preparations for real.

That teenage boy from ‘War Games’ could have been me. With my brown trousers, woolen sweaters and a pair of big glasses, I looked like the prototypical ‘nerd’. Ignored by the girls, clumsy in any type of sports and dreaming of a ‘cool’ future as a cartoonist or Science-fiction movie director. My best friends were just like me: wrong clothes, wrong hobbies, wrong haircuts. If I lived on Tatooine, I probably would be hanging out at Toshi station, drinking blue milk, picking up power converters and dreaming about a ‘cool’ future as part of the rebellion.

One of my friends had what no one else in my class had: a personal computer. A beautiful, second hand TRS-80, imported from the United States. Its country of origin made it even more exotic. After all, most things I admired came from the United States. Star Wars, the Atari 2600, Pac Man, Captain Kirk, Disney and the Space Shuttle. The U.S., in my eyes, was the coolest country in the world.

The computer monitor looked just like the ones in ‘War Games’. I gazed at countless lines of code that scrolled by in green text on a black background, as my friend tried to teach me the basics of computer language. While he seemed to be genuinly fascinated by the technical aspects of the computer, I was more interested in the creative opportunities it presented: if I were to master computer language, I could program my own games and make a fortune with the next ‘Pac Man’ or ‘Donkey Kong’!

I remember how excited I was when I saw the first advertisements in the newspaper for the ‘Sinclair ZX81 Personal Computer’, delivering “professional power for a hobby-price”.
“Dad, this computer comes with 1 Kilobyte of programmable RAM memory a with a whopping 8 Kilobyte operating system! That’s TWICE as much as in the previous model, the ZX80!” My dad made a conscious effort to appear interested. “Oh really? So..” “And you can hook it up to a regular TV; we would save so much money because it doesn’t need a dedicated computer monitor!”

“Ah”, said my father, browsing through the papers on his desk.

In hindsight, I should have built it up much more slowly. I should have deployed a careful strategy that would have involved hinting at my upcoming birthday, negotiations with my mom, convincing my brother and sister that the ZX81 should be part of their future as well, and perhaps even arranging a talk between my parents and the parents of my computer buddy about the wonders of having a personal computer in your home.

But in a reckless attempt to win my father over right there and then, I played my two most valuable cards way too early in the game: the emphasis on the educational value of a personal computer, and the idea of generously sharing this computer with my brother and sister. “Imagine how much we kids -Jeroen, my brother, Fiona, my sister and me- could learn from modern technology if we would own a computer like this! Almost nobody has a computer in school, it would give us a huge headstart!”

“So what exactly is the price of this computer?” Yikes. My father pointed straight at the only weak point in my impressive Death Star plans.

“Uhm.. it’s ehm.. 595 guilders. But this advertisement says it comes with a power brick, with all the cables you need to hook it up, and you get a cassette tape with programs and a manual for free!”

“595? That’s more than the price of a modern black and white TV!” my father frowned. “How are you going to pay for that?”

Wait. How *I* am going to pay for that? I assumed that every father in the world would jump at the occasion of purchasing cutting-edge professional technology “for a hobby price” in order to prepare his kids for the 21st century!

“Well.. I saved up money for years now,” I said – and this was true. While classmates spent their weekly allowance on junkfood and music, I had put most of it into a savings account. But it wasn’t enough to buy that computer. “Perhaps my brother and I can put our savings together and pay half of it, and you could finance the other half instead of giving us presents for our birthdays.” I told my dad that I was even ready to give up my december presents as well, as long as we could have that computer.

Of course, negotiations failed that day, and for months I would scan every single computer ad in the newspapers for information about the ZX81. I would cut out the ads and keep them in a special folder. I talked for hours with my brother about how cool it would be to own a real personal computer, and he too, became more and more enthusiastic.

After several months, the price of the ZX81 came down as the miniature computer became a huge hit in Europe. Somehow my brother and I were able to convince our parents that the ZX81 would indeed be valuable for our education, and not just a very expensive gadget that would suffer the same dusty, discarded fate as our vast collection of no-longer-cool Micronauts action figures.

And on one glorious day, the box finally arrived. It was black, with a rendered photo of the ZX81 on the front, surrounded by a red rectangle containing the words “SINCLAIR ZX81″. In blue text on the side, the box said “Personal Computer” – after all, computers were a novelty, and the non-initiated -like my parents and the rest of the world- might otherwise have mistaken the product for a fancy cooking scale of some sorts.

The unboxing itself was a complete geek-fest. “This is awesome! I can’t believe they can pack an entire personal computer in such a small casing!” “Careful, don’t damage the cassette tape!” “Wow, that manual is huge!”, “Wait, what are these. Oh, cables.”

We brought the computer to the small spare bedroom and placed it on the desk. “Dad, can we use our old TV as a monitor?” We had just gotten our first Sony color TV, and the 12 inch black and white TV had moved from the living room to the attic. “Hm. Ok. But I don’t want you kids staring at the screen for hours every day, you will ruin your eyes!”

We brought the TV to the spare bedroom and hooked it up to the computer. After connecting the power supply, our hearts beating from all the excitement, we flipped the switch…
Nothing. A white screen. “Is that all?” my father asked. I couldn’t help but feeling disappointed. No logo, no sound, just a white screen. But wait! A tiny black cursor was blinking in the lower left part of the screen. I pressed ‘p’. The word “PRINT” appeared. “It WORKS!” I yelled. “Hold on, I know some BASIC. Let me give a full print command!”

I typed ‘10 PRINT “HELLO”‘. Enter. Nothing happened. “Oh wait, I have to execute the program.” I pressed ‘R’. The word “RUN” appeared on the screen. I pressed ‘Enter’ again. The line of code disappeared, the screen turned blank and in the upper left corner, the word “HELLO” appeared.

At that point, I was jumping up and down. “This is AWESOME!!! TOTALLY AWESOME!!” I had just created my first computer program ever ON OUR VERY OWN personal computer! It felt as if Obi-Wan Kenobi had just handed me my first lightsaber.

“Okay, that’s enough for now, it’s getting late and you still have to do your homework”, my father said, while switching off the computer. “But dad!” I begged, “I want to read the manual and do some more programming!” “You can waste time with that computer when your chores are done!”

I knew at that moment how Luke felt when his uncle Owen told him to stay on the farm and help with the harvest. Who cares about farming if instead, you can learn the ways of the Force!
But that evening, I crawled into bed with the ZX81 manual in my hands. And while I was reading about the secrets of computer programming I felt that nothing would be the same anymore. From farmboy, I had become a Jedi. And it felt great.