I Spent The Afternoon Typing Code And Finally My Name Appeared In Block Letters

I spent the afternoon typing code and finally my name appeared in block letters. I was ten years old. It was the very early 1980s. My dad had just purchased a TI-99 home computer for our family to share but I was the only one who used it. Ever. It was a bit bigger than a current Mac laptop--not the new tiny one--but it was by no means portable, at least not in any useful way. (A flower pot is portable, but so what?) To run a program or play a game, you inserted a cartridge into a slot similar to that of an eight-track tape machine. In those halcyon days, many programs were not yet available in the slickly packaged cartridge format. These other programs were on cassette. Yes, magnetic tape--the same kind you would pop into the dashboard cassette deck of your mom's Chevette when you wanted to listen to Supertramp. The tape deck for the TI-99 home computer was an external affair, the same kind on which your third grade teacher used to play the audio track for a film strip in class. Advance to the next slide at the sound of the beep. The TI-99 deck was connected to the computer by thick cables. You'd hit play and for several minutes the tape would speak electronic code into the computer's ear. You could turn up the volume on the tape deck and listen to the beeps and crackles of the code. (Fax machines speak this same language. The only other place I've heard the sound is on the other end of what was supposed to have been a phone call.) If you didn't have a tape deck and were tired of the same old cartridges, you could spend the better part of a weekend typing in your own code to varying and less-than-dazzling results. I remember one all-day session when I typed and typed and typed (cut me some slack, I was ten years old, and was copying computer code out of a book--stuff like "IF x, then GOTO y"--if it wasn't like that exactly, at the very least it made for difficult typing). Finally I finished copying the code from the book and typed "RUN" and pressed enter. Up popped my first name in block letters against a gray background. I watched as the text moved slowly around the screen, "bouncing" off the sides, feeling a mixture of pride and relief (which distracted me from the aching in my fingers). The future was there.