I was hooked on computers at a very young age.  Well maybe not as young as the computer genius today get hooked at, but for someone of my generation it was pretty young.  It was a Radio Shack computer.  To be more precise, it was a TRS-80 computer.  Otherwise known affectionately as a trash 80.  Usually by friend that owned one of the few other competing brands at the time, like something from Texas Instruments.  A company which to this day still manages to make a profit manufacturing calculators.

Our TRS-80 came with a keyboard, a monitor, and a cassette tape drive.  At first, I don’t think we had the cassette tape drive, but added it on later when we realized how annoying it was to only type programs into the computer, and then have to do it again every time we turned it off and back on again.  It’s good to be able to save your work.

I learned a few things from that computer that continue to haunt me to this day.  The first thing I learned, was how to write a computer program.  The TRS-80 came with it’s own BASIC instructional booklet, and allowed you to write programs in the BASIC programming language.  This was cool, and I was desperately hooked.

I also learned how to play games on a computer.  Yes, even in the mid seventies you could play computer games.  But what was really cool, was that you could also write your own computer games.  Sure, they were incredibly simple and graphics were totally non existent, but they were games none the less.  I think the first game I wrote was something where you had to guess a number between 1 and 10 and the computer would give you clues.  It used a random number generator to pick the number.

I also learned to play the game backgammon on the TRS80.  It came with one, I didn’t have to write it, and it was pretty cool.  I had never played backgammon before, and learned it exclusively from the computer.  Although for years afterwords, when I tried playing it on a real board in the real world, I never knew how to setup the board.

Still my passion for computer games and making computer games was ignited.  One that continues to this day.  Unfortunately, I was never able to make a career out of it, but I do own several gaming related websites.  With any luck, I’ll make enough off of those to start a gaming company and hire myself as Chief Game Designer Extraordinaire.