Poet Ponders the Digital

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley January 2007 Issue December 11, 2007 (1040 words) Students Programming for the Future Twenty-five years ago history was made. The Commodore 64, the first home computer to sell more than a million units, shipped just in time for the Christmas season of 1982. A year earlier, I had received what might still be the most important gift I have every received: a Commodore VIC-20. Thanks to Apple, Atari, Commodore, and a dozen smaller computer manufacturers, the late 1970s and early 1980s were an amazing time in computing history. By 1993, Commodore was bankrupt, Atari was sold off in pieces, and Apple was struggling to compete against IBM and a legion of “PC clones.” I am extremely glad I grew up during the personal computer revolution. A generation earlier, I might have built crystal radios and box cameras. Instead, I was learning to manipulate bits and bytes to produce sounds and images. I was thrilled the first time my VIC-20 played a “song” I had...

If I have to think of what things have changed my life, the answer is simple: computers. I have owned quite a few. If I had kept them, I would have an interesting museum of old technologies. Commodore VIC-20 My first computer at home was a Commodore VIC-20. It was an odd computer, soon replaced by Commodore with the C64 — the best selling computer model of all time. (More than 3 million of the original C64 were sold!) I have a real fondness for the early years of the home computer: Atari, Commodore, Apple, Tandy, Texas Instruments, and many others were competing to get technology into the home. They were all more interesting than the modern Apple Mac and IBM PC to me. Magazines like BYTE, PC World, PC Magazine, Compute, InCider, A+, and dozens of others included program code. You could enter BASIC, machine code, Pascal, or C programs and then change them to see how things worked. Today? The complexity of software no longer makes it possible to include code in a book. Games take do...