(no subject)

[unbibium]

A bit more of a positive memory to counter the one I posted earlier.

When I was 5, I was a l33t hax0r.

My parents had brought me in to talk to the teacher for Project Potential, a program for gifted kids. And they knew I liked computers, and they had one of those dual-floppy PETs, so they put me in front of it and said that I could play any game on that menu, except this one here because it's broken. Well, the broken one looked really cool, so I selected it anyway. ?SYNTAX ERROR, it said, giving a line number. I knew the LIST command, so I LISTed it and saw an @-sign in a command. I knew that was wrong, so I retyped the line without it and typed RUN. And then it worked.

Or so's my memory of it. Part of me thinks that can't be right, because how could I possibly know that much BASIC when I'm five years old? Did I even have a computer back then? I know my grandfather brought home a PET a couple of times, and at some point we bought an Atari 400, but it wasn't until some time later that we bought the BASIC cartridge for it. But I remember it.

Weird.

Comments

[pootrootbeer.livejournal.com]

They were TOTALLY testing your hax0ring abilities.

My earliest memory of BASIC programming was probably around age 8. My dad's friend had upgraded to the latest IBM model at the time, probably an XT or maybe AT, and we got his old CoCo as a hand-me-down. I had no storage devices so the only programs I ever wrote were the ones small enough that I didn't mind re-typing them in every time I wanted to run them.

[norsican.livejournal.com]

Ha! I was in Project Potential, too, at Ironwood Elementary. We learned about all sorts of exciting stuff like Venn Diagrams, and incorrect spanish.

the Venn Diagrams clinched it.

[pootrootbeer.livejournal.com]

Oh okay, what you guys called "Project Potential" was called "LOGIC" in my el'ment'ry school. I forget what the acronym stood for, but what it meant was once a month we got to get out of our normal classes and go to the computer lab and do math problems or program the turtle to draw rectangles in LOGO.

It was taught by the guidance counselor for the high school honors students. They started us out early.

Re: the Venn Diagrams clinched it.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

Dammit. I never had any cool programs like that. I got rooked.