I don’t think back on my early years with a computer anywhere near enough. Sam Henri Gold’s excellent article on the MacBook Neo made me need to do just that.

My mum got me a Commodore VIC-20 from the local Fine Fare supermarket when I was probably five. We were a Tomorrow’s World household and watched Star Trek repeats over dinner. She knew what was up.

Computers were going to eat the world, and her kid was going to be on the right end of the fork.

I spent hours on that machine. Days, weeks, months, and years. It came with a manual on how to program stuff in BASIC. We couldn’t afford a tape drive with it (legend has it that Mum actually bought the Vic-20 at a massive discount as they were clearing stock and nobody was buying them) so we only had a few cartridges with games.

Of course I played games. An asteroids clone, a space invaders clone, and a game of chess that my dad ended up getting into an argument with.

True story: He came down from spending an hour playing the computer at chess absolutely fuming. The thing cheated! He was educated enough to know that computers aren’t sentient, they can’t “cheat”, but there was obviously a bug! It had made an illegal move and, worse, it had subsequently beaten Dad.

This led him down a rabbit hole where he learned (and then taught me, lest I be caught out by a sneaky silicon opponent in future) about an obscure move called en passant, whereby a pawn can take a piece by moving past it diagonally, but only on a few particular squares on the board.

We were learning.

A few years later I got a hand-me-down Sinclair ZX Spectrum with a grand total of 48k of RAM. This thing had a tape drive, it had a joystick interface, and it had a carrier bag full of games. It also had a dodgy powerpack and, as it turned out, a broken audio cable that would disconnect randomly, often in the final ten seconds of a ten minute game load. Fun.

I had graduated to yelling at the computer now, following in my father’s footsteps.

The machine also came with four hefty volumes of INPUT magazine. Holy crap were those some insanely cool magazines. No internet, no disks, code was stored on tape and you crossed your fingers that they would load. The most reliable way to distribute code, to learn, was to buy magazines with actual code listings in them, and type them in.

And pray you hadn’t made a typo in the 1,000 lines you’d just entered.

You’d hit run and… it worked! I recruited whichever of Mum or Dad seemed to have most reserves of patience left to read out line after line of code to me as I typed. I learned to run the code every so often, to verify that what we’d done so far was correct before moving on. I learned what subroutines were, how to pass variables.

Mostly I learned to ensure my code lines were numbered in multiples of ten so that I could add lines between them later if needed.

I discovered that I could create sprites and assign them to letter keys on the keyboard. I could animate them to move across the screen. I made pretend games that drove cars around the screen, racing each other with no controls.

I got my dad to bring home reams of graph paper from his work (why they had graph paper I have no idea, he was a civil servant in the DHSS), but he brought it home by the box. I spent hours, days drawing out images on the graph paper then writing code to set up little 8x8 grids to print to the screen.

I was taking my art and putting it on the television and it was amazing. I was nine. For my tenth birthday I remember getting a card from an aunt that had a BASIC computer program in it. I read it and saw that it was making sounds, could see the rough sequence and “up and down-ness” of the notes, and guessed it was going to play Happy Birthday. I was right.

My parents were both impressed and thought I might be a witch.

The following year they had scrimped and saved and bought me an Atari ST. I was intimidated. This felt like a proper computer. It was certainly the first computer I owned that came in a box that looked new. Or actually a box at all.

This wasn’t something I could program easily. The previous machines presented essentially a REPL as the primary interface: type in lines of BASIC code to make the computer do things. The ST was different. It had a windowing system, a mouse, icons! You launched programs to make it do things, and then quit them to return to the desktop, instead of just pulling the power code when you were done.

It was new. It was exciting. It ran games, for sure (I lost so many months to Buggy Boy and Operation Wolf), but also art packages, music trackers (TCB Tracker for life), samplers, desktop publishing software, vector art creators… so much stuff.

It was my main computer for eight years. Eight years. I upgraded the RAM, and even ended up hacking together a hard drive that just about mostly worked most of the time.

My favourite program, though, was Protext. Looking back, it was “just” a text editor, but it transformed my computer into a place for writing. A place where I could draft my stories and my reports for school. A place where I could put down my thoughts in a way that stripped them back to the purest essence. Devoid of thinking about presentation, there were no fonts to pick from, no text sizes, no headers, nothing. Just me, a screen, my fingers, and my ideas.

No wonder I still use Neovim.

I’d write in Protext, then save the file out and import it to Timeworks for getting ready to print out for handing in to school. I’d add in pictures I’d made, charts I’d compiled, and place the stapled output neatly on a pile alongside everyone else’s handwritten efforts, lousy with Tipp-ex and smudged ink.

I suspect people hated me. But I loved it. I loved being able to use this box of wonders to create. And that desire fed the games I played. I graduated from Buggy Boy and Operation Wolf to Frontier, a game where the story happened as much outside the game as inside it. I was Commander Harwood, rogue smuggler and bounty hunter, occasional arms dealer but also sympathetic to the explorers of the cosmos, happy to ferry them to remote star systems. For a price. Alongside the mechanics of the game (fly to spaceport, pick up jobs and cargo, map a course to the next star system, fly to spaceport, complete jobs, fight off pirates), I kept a diary of Harwood’s thoughts as he travelled the galaxy. What was he doing on those long flights? At one point I had him playing a game of chess with a far off friend, correspondence chess during long haul flights. I’d track the moves on a real board next to the computer, and then on breaks I’d set up the board in Colossus Chess X and get the computer to make the next move.

Harwood was a pretty lousy player, but occasionally he’d get lucky: I’d set the computer skill to -1.

After I finished school and went to university I bought myself a PC, then a Mac, and, well, here I am. As I got access to more and more finance, I found myself able to choose whatever computer best fit what I wanted to do. I was able to experiment with what fit, buying something, trying it out for a year, then exchanging it for something else.

As a kid, I worked with what I had. And frankly, I think I had more fun.

It’s easy to read this as a rose-tinted view of the shift. This stuff used to be fun, now it’s work. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

But I don’t think that’s it at all. Or at least not the interesting part.

Desktop publishing on the ST was slow. Frontier ran at maybe 10 frames a second on a good day with empty space in front of you. Those floppy drives could take minutes to save or load a long essay. Creating graphics “larger” than the display (essential for print work to not look blocky) would make the computer so hot you could hear the plastic case clicking and creaking as it warped. It was objectively horrible, and I was well aware of it at the time.

But I never saw the solution as I need a new machine. I might have read the magazines and wondered what an Atari TT or a Falcon might have been capable of, but they were pipe dreams and the magazines knew it. And really, I never actually wanted a new machine. I wanted to explore every nook and cranny of the box I had in front of me, to see what I could still shake loose from it.

Reading Sam’s article, there I was. A part of me I’d forgotten about. The part of me that didn’t give a shit about the computer’s limitations, as fixed as granite as they were against my meagre budget. But I didn’t care. All I cared about was making it do what I wanted, create the output I could see in my head. And I didn’t care if it was slow, or messy, or risked burning a literal hole in my desk by leaving it running overnight. All I cared about was making the thing do the thing.

And it was glorious.

These days, I often think of computers as tools, but I used to see them as treasure boxes.

Treasure boxes are buried, hidden. They require effort to unearth. Who knows if they’re even there, or if they’ll be empty when you finally haul them up. But you dig anyway.

You dig because digging is fun, the hunt is fun, and sometimes…

Sometimes you get the gold.