There were many like it but this was mine.

Couldn’t resist throwing up a pic of my first computer I ever owned. I remember being 12 years old back in 1980 and working all summer bailing hay and pulling weeds in people’s gardens to earn enough money to plunk down the $399.00 to get my hands on one of these. I mean 4k RAM!! Wow! lol. For its time is was so exciting. I used a small old black and white tv my parents had, a tape deck to store my applications(yes you heard right. A tape deck!) I wrote in Microsoft BASIC, like a cheesy flight simulator I slapped together that essentially was, “don’t crash into the side of the tunnel and press the fire button at the end.” Physics engines be damned! Still it was so much fun and I spent hours and hours programming on it. Loved that computer.

Actually while writing this, I was thinking of the ending of the film “Jarhead,” about Anthony Swofford’s tour of duty in the first Gulf War. Of course I had to modify it slightly…

“A story: A boy uses a TRS-80 Color Computer for many years, and he goes to write code. And afterward he turns the TRS-80 in at the local thrift shop, and he believes he’s finished with the TRS-80 Color Computer. But no matter what else he might do with his hands, love a woman, build a house, change his son’s diaper; his hands remember the TRS-80 Color Computer.”

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In Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s “Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai,” there is a passage that reads “There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.”

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