My spirit animal is a computer… code.
In life, some experiences and possibilities intersect your path. Occurring not from chance, though, you didn’t impose its intention. The right place at the right time adage is one example. Circumstances are mated and carried from your curiosity and desire. My desire for computers was born at my grandmother’s living room coffee table. She maintained the Instagram of the day, proudly on display neatly overlayed, the months’ magazine offerings. In the early 80’s she had a spread of around a dozen or more different magazines with subjects such as art, entertainment, nature, science, technology, computers, current events, sports, news, etc.. As a kid, I would look at them all, but I tended to be most enamored with the science, technology, computer selection. Mind you, I’m young, so I’m not really reading the magazines; I am mostly looking at the pictures. I would even ask to borrow and take home these issues for a few days; those computer ones had me. Sometime later, my grandmother seeing my growing interest in computers, got me my very own subscription to Family Computing. We filled out the subscription card, and now I had delivered to my house in my name, my very own magazine subscription.
That early on, in the advent of home computers, not many people had them in their homes. At my elementary school, we had a computer lab with Commodore PET, Apple II, and Apple IIe computers. I cherish those early experiences, but a class period wasn’t enough time to learn. By the way, we were loading programs from cassettes; I remember hardly anything we attempted to do in those small windows of time working. Nonetheless, what I remember working, more than not was a Logo, Turtle graphic type program, which flavor of the program or particular computer it was executed on; I don’t remember. However, I remember a few lines of code, and a few commands always produced a quick outcome. Graphics generating and simulating movement on the screen, not much, but very powerful indeed.
My fascination with computers must have been coming out of my ears during that time. Within a year or two of getting the magazine subscription, the most incredible event that ever happened in my life occurred. My mother brought home a Tandy 1000. And it was agreed I could keep the computer and it would be mine if I handled the monthly payments, which I happily did with the money I made from my paper route. I had my very own computer that I seem to manifest by staring at it in magazines and catalogs. I’m sure I expressed a desire to have a computer to my parents, but $1000 at the time is no small expense for fulfilling a desire of an eleven-year-old. I didn’t even know what I could entirely do with it back then.
No more looking over my childhood friend and neighbors shoulder watching him operate his family Amiga 1000. I had my very own computer. The magazines were becoming less important because of the fanciful pictures, and more important, because of the words, I started to read them. Little by little, I began to understand them. Armed with my magazine subscription and the Tandy 1000, I attempted to write programs in BASIC. My star magazine was a Family Computing Magazine, special issue.
This momentous time of my life was short-lived. Through family decisions, job relocations, and moving to another state, it was decided by everyone but me, without the paper route, I would be unable to pay for the computer, so it was returned. And derailed any passion for the pursuit of wanting to figure out What Would This Digital Domain teach me about myself. Though still throughout my life, I’ve always held computers and technology in high regard. But nothing has rivaled those feelings of those early years.
Currently, COVID19 is keeping people indoors and giving us time to reflect. Time to better ourselves. Opportunity to course-correct. I’ve presently sidelined myself and have had a lot of time to ponder. Time to catch up on rest. Time to learn things I hadn’t made time for before. I’ve started some online courses learning a few computer languages. And that alone has awakened a desire to conquer and control this computer realm like I once aspired to do when I was young. Back in 1985, I was interfacing with one machine. Today one machine can interface with the world. You can also do that with an image or video you share on social media or program an app that the world could use to share such media; I will do the latter. I’m gonna take this pause in life to become a software engineer. I am partly doing this through self-study. But I would like to go far fast, so I enrolled in a coding Bootcamp learning software engineering to become a full-stack web developer. Although we are worlds away from Logo and BASIC and how they compare with the hundreds of current programming languages. To me, it still very similar, requiring some of the same elements. The coder or programmer and what they bring to the party as far as problem-solving skills, the computer, and the magazine. But today, to me, the biggest magazine to ever exist is the whole internet.
