Comment by cubano | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cubano | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

My father bought our family an original IBM PC (4.77MHz) when I was around 15 years old, after I spent 2 years riding my bike to the local Radio Shack and sitting, literally, in the display window of the store hacking on a TRS-80 and saving my "work" on a cassette drive.

I became good friends with the salesmen (yes they were all men back then) and they liked me working in the window...it helped them sell the system if they could show a 12-year old kid writing programs on it. "How hard can it be if..."

The first real program I ever wrote was in MS ROM-BASIC (that's what I remember calling it, because it booted into it if you didn't put the DOS floppy into one of the two (yes two, we were lucky!) 360k floppy drives it had.

The program was a blackjack simulation and trainer for counting cards. My older brother became infatuated with the topic and I remember reading the books on it and wondering if the math and systems were real or just casino trickery.

So I learned this version of BASIC and went to town, building decks of cards and configurable card-counting systems, and proved to myself that, yes, under certain conditions, BJ counters do actually have a long-term advantage over the house.

It's fascinating to see the actual code that ran my simulations.

@cubano oh, man, your story struck a nerve with me. I did exactly the same thing. A friend and I would ride our bikes to a shopping mall about 5 miles away to hack on commodore 64 and, others up in Hudson's department store. Hudson's use to have a small electronics area where they mostly sold stereo equipment but they had 3-4 tables setup with computers on them. We saved our programs to cassette tapes. I was bitten by the computer bug the summer War Games came out. The local movie theater was auctioning off a commodore 64 so the same friend and I went to the movie theatre every day, took home a stack of contest entry forms, filled them out, went back and stuffed them in the box. Never won anything. It was probably another year before my paper route gave me the $300 I needed to buy my first computer.

As I read this post I thought the same thing as you; how fascinating it was to see the actual code that ran many of my programs.

In my time, I got into BBS software and assembler and I find myself copying the BASIC Emulator out of ROM and studying it.

anyway, it's just so cool to read posts by so many people that thought the same way.

I use to sell computers and electronics at Hudson's (in Harper Woods, MI). Commodores were a bit before my working days. I was selling IBM PS2, Epson and some Macs. Good times! Sorry, a bit off topic. But, this is where I started my software development career. :-)

Harper wooeds, MI.... oh, jeeze, I grew up in the downriver area; the mall was Southland mall in Southgate, MI.

anyway, it's just so cool to read posts by so many people that thought the same way.

Just FYI, I felt the same way reading your post. Thanks for that.

Of course I remember the C-64, and it's "advanced" sprite handling routines...it sure beat PEEKing and POKEing memory in BASIC.

"I’d befriended a number of Tandy store managers in and around Amsterdam, they let me play with the bigger machines"

Tandy was the RadioShack brand in Europe.

From: http://jacquesmattheij.com/computers-I-have-known

I wonder how many kids got their start with computers because of friendly RS employees.

Thank you Gidon & Gert Jan, wherever you are.

I did the same, with ageing Commodore 64s and Amstrad CPC 464s - and one Acorn Archimedes, although that was the superior BBC BASIC - on display in a variety of independent computer shops around Galway, Ireland.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com