Trashed

39

Three kids playing games on the school's computer: What could possibly go right?

Getting a note from my math teacher to use the school's computer was no problem given how much I had impressed him. Then I followed the example of Jonathan and Luke as they entered the Auditorium at the start of Directed Study and handed their notes to one of the monitoring teachers. I did the same and we turned around and left. The school's computer was in the 'teacher's lounge' on one of the tables, so we got to take the back entrance to the 'office area' of this open concept school and settle down. While Jonathan and Luke were a little wary of a third wheel joining them, I soon proved my worth.

This desktop unit, then referred to as a 'microcomputer', was the TRS-80 Model I with a built-in Level I BASIC programing language and four kilobytes of memory. TRS stood for Tandy Radio Shack, the corporation and chain of stores which sold it, but lovers and detractors of the computer line just called them Trash-80s. This unit was missing a very important item: A cassette recorder. The only means of persistent storage for the computer, without it meant we would spend the period typing in a game program out of a magazine and, with luck, have the last ten to twenty minutes of the period to actually play it. Often, though, the process of typing it in manually meant typos leaving the program to crash or worse play oddly leaving us to wonder if that was how the game had been intended to work or not. When on their own, Jonathan and Luke would trade off who read the computer code out of the magazine and who typed it in. With me there, we now had someone who could watch the screen and verify that what was told was what was typed in. This lead to a far better chance of having a game we could play once we were done.

And play we did.

Still most of our time was spent looking at the gibberish of the computer code and typing it. After several months of this I started to notice patterns in this gibberish that seemed to correspond to what happened once the game was running. With this in mind, I encouraged small variations as we typed in the code of a familiar program and sure enough they resulted in a desired change in the game appearance and flow. By the fourth quarter of our Freshmen school year, I felt I was now familiar enough with the patterns of gibberish to write my own game. One of the nights I was at my father's house, I pulled out the family's old manual typewriter and started typing away. A few pages later I had completed what I intended to be a tank battle game not unlike the Atari game of the time.

The next day, rather than type in a program from a magazine, I convinced Jonathan and Luke to let us use the program I'd typed up at home. After a little hesitation they agreed and we spent the next two thirds of the period typing it in and the last third trying to debug it as it didn't run at all. After this failure, I decided not to subject Jonathan and Luke to another lost period and sought out other times during the school day when I could squeeze in a little one on one time with the machine. But those opportunities were fleeting.

A few months after the start of the school year, my new friend Ed had disappeared. He was no longer on the bus or at High School and I went to his apartment to see what was up. His parents told me he was gone and they didn't know to where. About six months later I bumped into him at the combination drug store/diner in the apartment town and asked where he'd been. Turned out he'd been 'thrown out of house' by his family, but now had a job and was living with another family. He asked what I'd been up to and I told him about the school year, but more excitedly about using the school's computer. It turned out the family he lived with had one and they didn't know what to do with it. In short order I was invited over to their house to show them how to type in games out of magazines and discovered they had something I had never seen before: A manual. They also had the cassette recorder so once we got the games typed in and running, I figured out how to save them allowing the owner to load-up and play a game on it whenever he wanted. In return for this, I was allowed a couple hours each weekend to play with their computer on my own.

I used this time to read the manual and tryout the examples it had. The TRS-80 Level I computer manual was essentially a cartoon book with a stick figure that talked about the basics of computer programming and language structure. Soon the gibberish we'd been typing into the computers for the past many months started to have meaning and the structures of the code were the patterns I'd started to see. With this new information, I was ready to review my tank battle program and get it working, but looking at it I realized that I really had no clue what I was doing at the time I typed it up and tossed it aside.

My chance to use this family's computer also fizzed after a couple months when I showed-up at the house to find that Ed was gone. No news where he had gone to. As I'd been so helpful in the past few weeks, they let me have one more chance to use their computer for a few hours, though after that I should find another place to go to...

But where was another place? While I had money stuffed away in the bank, it was no where near enough to buy my own Trash-80. So, I'd have to find a place where the computers were sitting around and not being used. It occurred to me a Radio Shack store was the obvious place, but with one at the capital city twenty miles away, or the other one twenty miles west of my family's home town, there seemed little hope. And the end of the school year was here, so access to the school's computer would soon be gone, too.

As it turned out, I would be gone as well.

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