When Your Weird Hobby Takes Over the World (Part 1)

Imagine if as a kid you were really into the harmonica. It was your weird little hobby. But then over the course of the next 40 years, somehow the world's economy completely reconstructed itself around the harmonica. And now everyone you know has to play the harmonica, or deal with it even if they don't like it. You see harmonica billionaires everywhere, even a few trillion-dollar harmonica companies. The world is now just as obsessed with harmonicas as you were as a kid. When it was just your weird little hobby.

That's what the world feels like to me.

This is the first in a series of posts about my history with computers. I want to describe how it feels for your weird little obsession (computers) to end up taking over the world.

I was born in 1976. My dad was an electrical engineer, but more importantly he was a tinkerer. My formative memories of him (aside from me sometimes falling asleep on his chest watching hockey at night) were of him building, repairing, or tearing something down to see how it worked. So it's little wonder then that in the late 1970s, he'd find his way to buying a computer.

The earliest statistics on household computer use I can find are from 1984. The US Current Population Survey (CPS) in 1984 shows 8% penetration. My best extrapolation would put it at around 2% in the US for 1980. And likely lower in Canada, where I grew up. Overall, it's hard to deny that getting a computer was a fairly unusual thing to do back then. A notable event.

I still remember it like it was yesterday, as they say. More accurately, I've replayed the event so many times in my head that who knows where the original memory ends and the layers of reconstruction begin. We took a car trip. Not to the local store, because in Canada in 1980, you couldn't just go buy a computer. Or at least, not one that my dad would have considered good enough.

So we piled into the car for a 130mi trip across the border to Detroit. I was confused where we were going, and my dad was being awfully mysterious in his answers to my questions. I'm sure I was being my usual annoying self, but I imagine he might have wanted to short-circuit an interminable array of follow-up questions if he had told me "I'm picking up a computer." At age 4 in 1980, I'm quite sure I had no idea what one of those was.

At any rate, we eventually got to the place, a leafy semi-industrial park in suburban Detroit where we picked up a big box containing the computer my dad had ordered months ago: a North Star Horizon. Modern Internet sleuthing tells me that its sale price was "$1899 assembled, $1599 as a kit". Thinking back, that probably represented something like 5% of my dad's gross annual income. Quite an investment at the time.

You can probably guess which option my dad picked. He may well have selected the kit option even if it had been $300 more expensive, but either way I remember little about the trip home. What I do remember were the weeks (months?) of secretive activity in the 3rd bedroom of our townhouse, where I was prohibited from entering on pain of... something bad. What was going on in there? And why did it smell like that?

It's said that smell is one of our most primal memory-triggering senses. For my part, I can attest to the fact that even today, 46 years later, the smell of solder reminds me of that little townhouse on Murdock street. The first olfactory indications, perhaps, of what would eventually become my weird little hobby.

Eventually, the machine was built and ready for use. Again, it's important to note that I still didn't know what it was. All I could see was a metal box with a wood cover, and a thing that looked like a TV except it only displayed blue text. It beeped every so often for inscrutable reasons, and the most important thing about it was that I wasn't supposed to touch it.

Until Christmas 1980 rolled around, when one fine day I was beckoned to that little room. My dad had proudly put up an ASCII Christmas tree on the screen. I remember not really understanding what the point was, or why he was so proud of that rather pokey little tree. Then he asked me "Do you think we can make the star at the top blink?"

I didn't understand, but I sat on his lap and watched. The tree disappeared and a wall of text replaced it, a computer language I'd eventually come to learn well: Pascal. Furious typing on that thing with the letters ensued. The tree would come back, but a little crooked, my dad mildly annoyed. More text, more tree efforts, back and forth until eventually, after the last bug got squashed: at last the blinking star. My dad was proud, and I imagine I made noises like I was suitably impressed. Then I asked if we could make the whole tree blink.

At this point my memory gets hazy again. In my more self-important moments, I tell myself that I helped my dad make the code changes. In more realistic ones, he probably made the changes while guiding my fingers a few times. But what I know I felt, when the whole tree started to blink, was it. The feeling that every programmer, nerd, builder, and dreamer feels when they finally make the universe bend to their will. I didn't know it at the time, of course. All that 4-year-old knew, on that Canada-cold December day in 1980, is that he wanted more computer. A lot more. He had his weird little hobby.

In the next episode, our hero gets his own computer, an Apple II+.