Tikkabik

I'd already had a fair amount of experience with computers -- a lot more than other kids my age at the time. An adult named Ron Friedman gave me my first exposure to personal computers -- he was my Big Brother, through the Jewish Big Brother/Big Sister program, and as I remember he was a systems analyst working for a big downtown Boston law firm. Ron bought a TRS-80 Model 1 fairly soon after they first came out, and quickly amassed an impressive setup with a 12-inch black and white display, cassette data drive and other trappings.

We would often go to his house to use it, and thanks to a lack of readily available software and a lack of desire to buy what was out there, we'd often opt to write our own code using BASIC. I got down the fundamentals pretty quickly, and eventually learned how to program simple math games complete with graphics.

Eventually my mother budgeted a computer for our home. I begged her for an Apple II, because that's what a couple of kids I knew had, that's what the schools were getting, and that's what was popular. Mom put the kibosh on it, as I remember, because she felt that I'd probably spend all my time playing games on it, and she wanted me to learn. So she bought a TI-99/4A instead. After all, Bill Cosby was shilling them and TI made calculators, so they must be legit.

Of course, mom either neglected to realize or failed to understand the implications of the TI's built-in solid-state cartridge slot. After all, what better use for cartridges at the time than games?

So with this experience behind me, I had a pretty clear understanding in 1984 that a computer was driven by a command-line interface and that, outside of playing games, the barrier to entry to actually *doing* something with it required a fairly high degree of user sophistication. On that day, I saw my first Mac, and my entire understanding of what a computer could be used for shifted utterly.

A fellow -- I don't honestly remember if he was a salesman for a computer store or just an early Mac enthusiast -- was showing off an original, beige Macintosh with a keyboard and a hitherto unknown peripheral called a mouse. On the screen he was running a program called MacPaint. I "got" the concept immediately -- I could move the mouse around the screen, select tools from a palette, and generate pictures.

Menus popped down to offer up a host of other commands for me to choose from -- saving files, opening files, copying, cutting and pasting. And all of the content was stored on a smaller floppy disk than I'd ever seen before, that could hold a whopping 400K -- more than three times the amount of the machine's already prodigious system memory, compared to the systems I'd worked with. What's more, those images could be printed out on an Apple ImageWriter, and lo and behold, they looked the same on the page as they did on the screen.

The whole concept was mind-blowing. The Mac immediately became an object of techno-lust for me, and every opportunity I had to play with or touch one I would gleefully indulge.

After a time, it became clear that the TI was getting long in the tooth, and that I'd eventually need a better computer. I begged. Pleaded. Cajoled. Demanded. Whined. Eventually, I got one, in 1985 -- one day, my mother came home from work with a 512K "Fat Mac" and a wide-carriage ImageWriter.

A few months later, a friend of mine came into possession of a 2400 baud Apple modem, but had no computer to use it with. I offered him a trade -- my TI, complete with expansion chassis and software, for the modem. Within a few days, I'd gotten the serial cable I needed to get online and was dialing up bulletin board systems all over eastern Mass.

It was, in retrospect, a fair trade -- I've been using Macs online almost continuously since then. As to my mother's presumption that no good would ever come of my game-playing, well, I've long proved that theory wrong as well.