I think I was in grade six when my family got our first home computer. I cottoned to it immediately and spent months playing endless games of "Hunt the Wumpus", "Munchman" and when the only other guy I knew with a TI was feeling benevolent (usually due to some totally one-sided juvenile "deal"), a few rounds of borrowed "Parsec".

When I grew tired of playing games on it, probably because Atari was waaay cooler and my parents just weren't interested in buying additional carts, I picked up the manual to see what else this thing could do. It had all these ports and inputs on it that my joystick and carts wouldn't fit into and I knew that figuring out what they were for would probably lead to *something* interesting.

I don't remember what the manual had to say about all the different input options because the manual held something far more interesting than schematics.

The sucker was programmable.

I'll never forget sitting in front of the TV on the weekends for hours retyping in line after line of programming samples from the manual...

Here's one of the first;

It was a total buzz linking a bunch of these together into a bunch of sounds. It was even cooler when I made the connection between the frequencies my TI was generating and the notes on a scale. I was quickly programming in music from my piano books. While it didn't do much for my style, it certainly did improve my ability to read sheet music.

The TI was pretty limiting though. Not only did it have one of the slowest basic interpreters in the world, mine didn't come with any storage. And my parents just weren't interesting in buying any additional peripherals. (I've said that twice now. In fairness to my parents,  they were probably "interested" but the fact was that all of the good accessories cost serious money and the fact that none of my other three siblings...or anyone else for that matter really did anything much but play games on the darn thing. A cassette drive was out of the question.)

I was happy to deal with the lack of permanent storage right up to the point where I spent eight hours one Saturday typing in a new slot machine game that I'd come across in a hobbyist magazine - it ended up being very cool. When it was done, my dad was understanding enough to let me play it for a few hours leave the computer turned on over night. "Okay, just don't turn it off" I remember admonishing him. The next day, I played slots for at least ten straight hours - there was some serious eye-bleeding going on. My mom had to ask me at least six times to shut off the computer and go to bed. I eventually did - I winced as I hit the power button and imagined my hard-won bits and bytes evaporating...

I don't remember using the TI after that. I felt I had mastered it and didn't really see much point in spending half my time typing stuff in for a few hours of slots...

Later that year I started junior high school. Grade 7. New school, new friends. A new Apple in the AV lab.

One ][e, 600 students. Needless to say we had to book time if we wanted to use it. Which I did, frequently - obsessively. I was quickly immersed in this new environment which had the drawback of being monochromatic, but had the benefit of a 5/14 floppy drive. Apple Basic wasn't that different from TI Basic and I picked up the nuances pretty quickly. My first real project was a "Wargames" RPG that walked you through the basic plot from the movie but allowed you to make key decisions every single step of the way. With my mind stuck in the depths of the cold-war and fully keyed into the nihilism that permeated everything at the time, the odds that you could successfully navigate the game without WOPR blowing up the world were slim (or was it none?).

I'd also managed to pick up a few paid gigs as well. One of my more ambitious efforts saw me programming a tax calculation program for a friend of my dads. It picked up the basic math and neatly printed the results out to a government supplied form. I remember being jazzed by the notion of plugging a four-ply carbon paper *official* form into the tractor fed dot matrix printer.

But shortly after this, I entered high-school where I discovered girls, cars and other adolescent pursuits - and stopped programming. Even though I did rediscover computing shortly after I left high-school, I never started programming again. That is, until this week. Earlier this month I decided that this winter I would learn enough PHP to write a simple server application. Three days ago, I took the first step and installed Apache, MySQL and PHP on my laptop. Last night, I wrote the obligatory "Hello World!" program. Tonight, I am going to try and write formdata to a database.

I'll let you know how it goes as things progress.

I apologize for the gap in updates and not doing a Podcast for over a week. Skydasher is sucking up a huge amount of my time, day and night, and I really wanted to spend the hour or two of free time that I've had this week getting some traction with PHP. This temporary jam should free up this week and next and I'll eventually get settled back in to a more engaging rhythm.