My first brush with computer programming came when I was around four years old. My parents had placed an old TV set in my room, then tethered it to this oddly-heavy beige, plastic box. The TV’s convexed screen was set beneath wood paneling in an assymetric bevel adorned by a confusing array of knobs, one permanently tuned to Channel 2, to the beige box, to the Atari 400. The computer and the TV were several years my senior.

The computer was the best toy I had, better even than Teddy Ruxpin. I played every game I could get my hands on, even ones that I had no idea how to play. I was tragically eaten by grues while aimlessly wandering in Zork. High gravity relentlessly crushed me in Scott Adams’s Questprobe featuring The Hulk before I resorted to the meta-game of getting the parser to craft oh-so-hilarious sentences like, I don't know how to "BUTT" something. The E.T. game’s odd perspective repeatedly lured me into ditches until I thought about smashing the cartridge.

Of course, it wasn’t all failure. I collected dots and terrorized ghosts in Pac Man. I had successful forays into collecting gold and burying people alive in Lode Runner. I avoided oil slicks and drove onto the back of moving trucks in Spy Hunter. I’m not sure the extent to which video games influence adolescent behavior, but I can truthfully attest that I’ve never buried anyone alive, and I’m kind of repulsed by Dippin Dots.

There was a positive influence. My voracious appetite for games led me to wonder how they were made. Could I make one myself? Armed with enough Atari DOS to list a disk’s directory, copy a file to the screen, and the Atari BASIC OPEN command, I peeked at what was inside a program disk. I was rewarded with screen after screen of utter gibberish. This was the Atari Extended ASCII that happened to correspond with the machine code I was displaying, but at the time I was uneqipped to grok the hieroglyphs that apparently comprised a program.

Writing an actual program would have to wait. Instead, I invented a new game: pretending to program by entering random gibberish into the BASIC prompt. My idea was a game oriented around Scooby Doo, but it quickly fell behind schedule, I failed to procure the rights, and the project was cancelled. If you squint and turn your head ever so slightly to the right, there’s a way of looking at this “pretending to program” experience as a case study in how software engineering really is for so many people.

Still, the idea of programming had taken up residence in my brain. My first grade science project involved making my best friend pretend he was a robot. It was accompanied by Logo and BASIC code. In retrospect, the project was about proceduralism, but I think at the time I just wanted to have a robotic turtle. That was as close as I could get back then.