Tennessee Tech University Department of Computer Science Blog

I was 14 at the time.  It was a Saturday, and my father had to go into work that day.  He asked me if I would like to go with him.  I didn’t really feel like spending a Saturday in an office, but my father said I could play on one of the computers there.  Needless to say, in the 1970’s, outside of the movies or television, most kids my age had never seen, let alone touch, a computer. I remember him allowing me to sit in this room, in front of a green-tinted screen, while he was going to work in the other room.  There were no icons. No internet browsers. Not even a mouse.  All that was between me and what was initially a blank screen was this big keyboard – not unlike the typewriter that I had learned typing on in school last year. He asked me if I wanted to play “Star Trek”.  Play a game?!  Sure!  We had no electronic games at home – other than a hand-held game called “pong”, which consisted of a mechanical device that bounced a lit-up dot (the ball) off a “wall” and my paddle, which I moved with knobs.  Sort of like an etch-a-sketch (if you know what that is).  No “screen”. No sounds.  Just a single dot behind a semi-clear piece of plastic that when I missed it bouncing off the wall with my paddle, I would lose a point – as opposed to every time I didn’t miss, I would get a point. But, what was in front of me now, was something completely different!

Everything was textual. The screen consisted of what were called quadrants. Nothing graphical about it – unless you counted the stars (represented by asterisks, or “*”), the Enterprise (shown with the letter “E”), and Klingons (marked with a “K”). The text on the screen showed me how many torpedoes I had, how many Klingons were left, and the health of my ship. I guessed I was not the only one with torpedoes! I was mesmerized by this ability I had to fire photon torpedoes and watch them move across the screen, in the hope that I just killed a Klingon warship. And I didn’t have to wait for the Klingons to attack – I could move the Enterprise in four different directions.  All I had to do was type in text from my keyboard. However, the Klingon(s) would also move, which was controlled by the computer. I was playing AGAINST a computer!

That was my first foray into computers. It was nothing like the PlayStations and Xboxes of today, and light-years away from virtual-reality games.  However, this machine was doing something behind the scenes that I could not see, but I could interact with it.  Ask it to do something, and watch it give me a result – feedback, both good and bad, whenever I pressed a key. I could see this thick, curly wire going from the keyboard to the box located below the screen (what my father would call a “terminal”), but how did the computer know to do what I just told it to do? How did this fascinating game where I was travelling in space and shooting ships get created?  Was it the only thing this computer could do?  Who cares?!  I played for hours.  When we were driving home, I was so excited, I wanted to tell my mother about this computer.  Unfortunately, it would have to wait until we got home – no such thing as a cell phone.  Not unless you were a secret agent, or a starship captain with a tricorder.

Next Time: My First Programming Class