maybe not so accidental this initiation into geekdom, back when the word geek was not yet as popular. this attempt at tracing the history of my computer garnished incarnation will end with important lessons learned along the way. that is if i remember what i was trying to do by the time i get to the end of this.
the first computer keys i ever touched were on a Radio Shack TRS-80, the early model, where you saved your routine on a cassette tape. it was at this school at the west end of Colon Street in Cebu, Manila Computer something i don’t really remember anymore.
i learned to write this code in BASIC which i vaguely remember resembled a rabbit running across and down the CRT screen. the display was green, with black text. i suppose it was green to help your eyes, but it sure didn’t help mine. i got fuzzy-eyed after an hour of trying to make the rabbit run across and down the screen. after the hour class was over. me and the rabbit went home.
soon after that STI opened on Osmeña Blvd. and the languages to learn were COBOL and FORTRAN. We had these wide sheets of paper with green (again!) but-not-quite-like-graphing-paper lines down and across on which we had to write routines and subroutines. i got as far as the third out of five levels in the course, after which i quit because paying for the courses became too expensive.
after that i got my hands on an old apple clone my dad bought from one of the first computer shops in cebu. i couldn’t get it to do anything except run a couple of games it had on a floppy disk. i think i’ll take a break here. all this walking down memory lane’s got me tired out.
Filed under: hysterical historia
