EVENT
My Childhood Computing and the IMSAI 8080
- At age 9, I made the conscious decision to choose computer programming as my lifelong career.
- Because I had no actual computer access at the time, I wrote my earliest code for the PDP-8 FOCAL language entirely on paper.
- At age 10, I got my first hands-on access to an HP2000 Time Shared BASIC system via a noisy ASR-33 Teletype terminal (which printed in strict uppercase!).
- I spent hundreds of self-taught hours at that terminal all the way through the end of high school, frequently taking over teaching duties for the BASIC programming class from our official computer teacher.
- During high school, I successfully built an IMSAI 8080 computer from a kit for the school's computer lab.
- Academically, I flunked middle-school English and took three full years of Journalism in high school specifically to avoid standard English writing classes, earning points for my typing and page layout skills rather than my prose.
- My only serious journalistic contribution was a front-page article titled "Randal assembles an IMSAI 8080 for the school." As the chief editor of the paper, I proudly ran it front and center on page one.
These facts are as Randal recalls them, but much time has passed for most of this. If you find a factual error, please email realmerlyn@gmail.com.