Every summer when I was a kid, we used to go to my aunt and uncle’s house for the annual TroutFest parade. (Yes, you read that correctly) The highlight of this parade was typically the town’s ChamberMaids – members of the chamber of commerce who would dress in drag, march and play bad polka music.
Since my aunt and uncle lived on the parade route, this was always a fun family event – I always thought it was cool that we got to park on their back lawn. Given that this particular uncle was an engineer by trade, he always had cool electronic stuff. This one particular year, that cool new electronic toy was a Radio Shack TR-80 Color computer (I might have the specific model wrong).
After turning the thing on successfully and finding the user manual, I proceeded to spend the next 3 or 4 hours going through every single sample program in the manual. I made a dot on the screen change colors, I think I probably made a circle bounce from one end of the screen to the other, etc. All the while, I barely even noticed that all of my relatives were outside in the sun watching the parade, drinking and laughing.
I think that might’ve been a pretty good clue for the entire family that I was a big ol’ nerd. :)
This experience alone is probably what inspired me to pool all of my savings and purchase a Commodore Vic-20 when I was in like, 5th grade. It helped that they used to sell magazines that printed code in them (remember the days when a single column of text was all it took to impress us?) – and that the local library had a subscription!
Good times…
I’m also doing the FFAF thing today (although I almost forgot) over at Waymorefunner
