My First Computer

It wasn't a computer, exactly. It was a gateway drug disguised as an educational toy. And it changed everything.

Before the 1977 Trinity, there was the Altair. I toggled my first program into one via front-panel switches—no keyboard, no screen, just blinking lights confirming your code ran. You'd flip switches to enter machine code, one instruction at a time, then hit the run switch and watch the LEDs. If the pattern was right, it worked. If not, you'd mistyped a binary digit somewhere in those dozens of toggles. That was the real beginning.

Then 1977 changed everything. Apple shipped the Apple II. Tandy released the TRS-80. Commodore unveiled the PET. Byte magazine would later call them the "1977 Trinity": the machines that brought personal computing to the masses. These had keyboards. Screens. BASIC built in. After the Altair's toggle switches, they felt like magic. I was a kid, and I wanted one desperately.

I didn't get one. What I got instead was a book. David Ahl's "BASIC Computer Games" showed up for Christmas, filled with program listings I couldn't run because I had no computer. I read it anyway. Over and over, tracing the logic with my finger, imagining what the games would do.

The Machines We Dreamed About

The Apple II cost $1,298 without a monitor, over $6,500 in today's dollars. The TRS-80 was the "affordable" option at $599, still nearly $3,000 adjusted. The Commodore PET started at $795 but was perpetually backordered. These were serious money. My family didn't have serious money.

But Radio Shack was everywhere. You could walk in and touch a TRS-80. The demo units were always running, usually some simple program the salespeople barely understood. I'd stand there for hours, typing in BASIC commands, until someone needed the machine or kicked me out.

The TRS-80 had a Z80 processor running at 1.77 MHz. Four kilobytes of RAM (4,096 bytes, not gigabytes). It used cassette tape for storage. You'd wait minutes for a program to load, hoping the audio quality held. As the Computer History Museum documents, the keyboard was terrible. The display was black and white. It was magic.

When It Finally Happened

My first actual computer came a few years later: a hand-me-down that barely worked. By then I'd been typing programs into school computers, borrowing time on friends' machines, haunting every Radio Shack within bus distance. Getting my own machine meant I could finally stop begging for access.

The feeling is hard to describe to anyone who grew up with ubiquitous computing. Imagine wanting something desperately for years. Reading about it constantly. Being able to see it but not touch it. And then finally having it. Your own. In your room. Available whenever you wanted.

I programmed constantly. Not because anyone told me to. Not for school. Not for any practical purpose. Because I could make this machine do things. I could type instructions and watch them execute. The feedback loop was immediate and addictive.

What 4K of RAM Teaches You

Modern developers can't imagine working in 4K of RAM. Your browser tab uses more than that for a single icon. But constraints create creativity. When every byte matters, you learn to think differently.

I learned to optimize before I learned what optimization meant. If a program was too long, it wouldn't fit. If a variable name was too verbose, you used shorter ones. Every line of code had to justify its existence. There was no room for waste.

This wasn't theoretical. The computer would literally refuse to run your program if it was too big. "OUT OF MEMORY" was the feedback loop that taught me efficiency. No amount of lecturing could have been as effective as that simple, brutal constraint.

Modern programmers sometimes ask why older developers obsess over performance and memory. This is why. We grew up with machines that couldn't afford slack. The habits stuck.

The Social Network Before Social Networks

Computers in the early 1980s were isolating in one way: you worked alone, in your room, with a screen. But they were connecting in another. If you were into computers, you found other people who were into computers. User groups. BBSs. The kid at school who also had a TRS-80.

We traded programs on cassette tapes. Copied them illegally, honestly. Software licensing wasn't something kids thought about. Shared tips and tricks. Figured out together how to make these machines do more than they were supposed to.

The community was small because the market was small. But that made it tight. When you found another kid who could actually program, you'd formed a bond. You spoke the same language. You understood something most adults didn't.

Typing Programs From Magazines

Before the internet, before software distribution channels, magazines printed program listings. Compute!, Creative Computing, Byte. Pages and pages of BASIC code that you'd type in by hand, character by character.

This was how software spread. You'd get the magazine, find a program that looked interesting, and spend hours typing it in. Then more hours debugging because you'd inevitably made typos. A single wrong character and the whole thing crashed.

It was tedious. It was frustrating. It was also the best programming education possible. You couldn't type mindlessly; you had to understand what you were typing well enough to spot mistakes. By the time you got a program running, you understood how it worked.

I don't romanticize it. Modern tooling is better. But something was lost when we stopped making kids type in their first programs character by character. The struggle was the learning.

When Computing Was Personal

The "personal computer" was personal in a way that modern devices aren't. You had complete control. You could examine every byte of memory. You could write directly to the hardware. Nothing was hidden from you.

Today's computers are more powerful but less accessible. There are layers of abstraction, operating systems, security boundaries. The machine does what you want, mostly, but you don't really control it. You're a guest in your own hardware.

Early personal computers felt like they were actually yours. No internet connection phoning home. No software as a service. No cloud dependency. If the power went out, you'd lose your work, but that was the only external dependency. The machine was complete in itself.

Why This Still Matters

I've been writing code for 45 years now. Patents, startups, government contracts, voice AI systems. None of it would have happened without that first contact. But this isn't just nostalgia. The lessons from those primitive machines matter more than ever.

I've seen modern developers debug performance problems without understanding memory allocation. They fight layer tax without knowing what the layers hide. They use ORMs that generate terrible SQL because they never learned to think in sets. When abstractions leak, understanding underneath matters.

The engineers I hire who started on constrained systems (old hardware, embedded systems, competitive programming with tight limits) debug faster. They optimize instinctively. They don't panic when the abstraction fails because they understand the layer below.

The Loss of the Metal

When I typed POKE on the TRS-80, a pixel lit up. I could see the direct connection between my command and the machine's response. One instruction, one result, no mystery.

When a kid types console.log today, it goes through Chrome, through V8, through the OS scheduler, through the GPU driver, through a display buffer. Eventually, maybe, pixels change. Fifty layers of abstraction separate the programmer from the machine.

The Abstraction Tax

Here's what 4K of RAM taught that modern frameworks hide: every abstraction has a cost, and you pay it whether you know it or not.

Abstraction Bloat Calculator

Compare what the same functionality costs across eras:

I've done performance forensics on modern applications. A React app that takes 3 seconds to render a list. A Python service that needs 2GB of RAM to process a CSV. An API that adds 400ms of latency because of ORM overhead. In each case, the developers couldn't explain why it was slow because they didn't understand the layers they were standing on.

The engineers who started on constrained systems—old hardware, embedded, competitive programming—debug these problems in hours. They think in memory layouts and cache lines. They know that somewhere, underneath all the abstraction, a CPU is still executing instructions one at a time. When the abstraction leaks, and it always does, that knowledge is the difference between a quick fix and a week of guessing.

I've seen this pattern repeatedly: the connection between hand and hardware has frayed. Many developers I've worked with can glue APIs together but struggle when the glue fails. That's not a criticism; it's the natural result of how we teach programming now.

This isn't gatekeeping nostalgia. It's an observation about debugging. When something goes wrong at layer 47, engineers who understand layers 1-10 can reason upward. Those who only know layer 47 face a harder path.

The Seeds of Everything After

The technology has changed utterly. The fundamentals haven't. You still write instructions. The machine still executes them. The feedback loop is still immediate. The addiction is the same.

When people ask how to get new engineers up to speed faster, I think about what worked for me. Constraints that forced understanding. Direct contact with the machine. Problems that couldn't be solved by copying from Stack Overflow. Not more abstractions, but the raw capability and the requirement to actually understand it.

"Every programmer I know who started in that era tells a similar story. The machine itself barely matters. What matters is that moment when you realize you can tell this thing what to do, and it does it."