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Video Games Built The Programmer’s Heart
A trip down memory lane and how its temporal ripples have panned out in the modern day dystopia of software engineering.
There’s no hiding the fact that a great many people of a certain age, and that would be around my own, got into software engineering (or “programming” as we call it) because of their experiences during their formative years back in the 1970s and 1980s.
This was back when computers where really quite expensive things and you only got to see them behind glass cases in expensive showrooms (Tandy or Radio Shack), read about them in glossy (and thick) magazines (Byte, I loved those out there covers), and (if you were very lucky indeed) could book time on the one they had at school¹ in a basement, behind a locked door.
They were elegant, beautiful things, with sharp high x-ray CRT screens that bounced into life with a click and hummed continually. They had keyboards that clicked not by design, but by function, and mice? Well, there were no mice, you had cursor keys and a luminous afterglow of where your cursor used to be after you pressed them.
The one thing that really stands out in my memory, though, is how you (or I, I hope it’s not just me) could spend hours and hours tapping away at them. Then, when the world moved into home computing with the explosion of 8-bit machines², even…
