Christmas 1983
The Sony MSX came with a thick book filled with Manga illustrations of some children, and a robot. Apart from my brief foray into programming the decrepit business computer the summer before, I had never programmed a computer before. I had no clue whatsoever. Luckily I had a Dad who didn't see “no skill, talent, or experience” as a hindrance at all. While we disappeared outside to laugh at my brother trying to look cool on his roller skates, my Dad hunched over the computer for hours, typing in programming commands from the book. By the time we came in he proudly stood back as the Olympic rings draw themselves onto the screen.“What does it do?”“That's it”“Yes, great, but what does it do next?”“No. That's itit's the rings”“Oh.“Even at 11 years old I suppose my expectations were unrealistically high. Dad's were supposed to know everything, weren't they ?The Olympic Rings program grew over the next few days of the Christmas Holiday (we had figured out how to save things on the tape recorder tooit was similar to loading, but even more unpredictable). My Dad spent hours and hours writing a program called “Zen”, named no doubt after the ship's computer in the 1970s Sci-Fi spectacular “Blakes Seven”. As far as I recall, Zen became the ship's computer after Orak died/melted (I have vague childhood memories of a horrific scene which probably involved nothing more than melted plastic, and some voice effects).
Zen asked you your name, what age you were, and then came back with a pithy response. Because we knew nothing about conditional statements in computer programming languages, Dad wrote out nearly a hundred lines of code to provide stupid remarks for every age from ten up. Visitors to the house would be invited/forced to sit in front of the computer, and would be interrogated before receiving all manner of acerbic comments about their parentage, and/or mental prowess. My Dad would laugh loudly and infectiously at the horrified reaction of his victims.
For months my programming skills extended no further than the following;10 PRINT “Hello”20 GOTO 10This mastery of course manifested itself in the most unlikely places. I was once told off by the shop floor staff in a well known high street store after re-programming their Atari 800. Just as the words “THIS COMPUTER IS RUBBISH” began writing themselves all over the screen, a voice quietly but firmly spoke into my ear;“Very clever. Now make it stop.“By early spring the local newsagent had started to carry a couple of computer magazines that catered for the MSX line of computers. Among the pages filled with breathless reviews of new games, there were often “listings”printed instructions to be copied by hand into your own computer to make it do something. You would typically buy the magazine and race home, marvelling at the full-page photo of a down-hill skier, imagining how amazing the 50 line program was going to be. You would spend hours copying each line of the program into the computer, and finally type “RUN”.“Syntax Error”.
Those two words would become the bane of your existence. They meant that either you had made a mistake copying the program from the magazine into the computer, or (more often than not) the magazine had made a mistake in the printed page. If you ever did get the program running, the fantasy you had been holding on to for the last several hours would be shattered by the disjointed stick man juddering down the screen, avoiding pipe cleaner trees until his hit one, causing the screen to flickr with the words “GAME OVER”. Quite often you would have made a mistake in the last line of the programusually a “data” statement, which resulted in your stick man skier looking more like a broken piece of waffle.