I remember my first time...

A recent ACM Queue Advice Column by Kode Vicious, called Advice to a Newbie, asked:

Do you remember the first time? The first time when, after struggling with a piece of code, you felt not only "I can do this!" but also "I love doing this!"

I still remember that rush. It was addictive. When it happened I decided what I wanted to be when a grew up: a computer programmer.

In 1983 I was senior at Troy High School, in Michigan. I was taking a computer programming elective at the same time I was taking trigonometry. We were learning BASIC on Apple IIe computers. Our final assignment was to write a graphic animation of something. Anything. Mine was influenced by both being a high-school student and America's 1981 return to space with NASA's shuttle program.

Using BASIC and the IIe's low-resolution graphics (pixels that seemed the size of a Tic-Tac) I simulated the launch of the Space Shuttle Columbian (did I mention I was in high school?). My rendering of the shuttle was as good as it could have been, considering the resolution, and included a 10-second count-down, smoke, flames, and a lift-off off the top of the screen. After that the shuttle was flying right-to-left, with the appearance of motion provided by stars in the background moving left-to-right. The loops were gigantic. Inside the loops the program made sure the stars disappeared behind the shuttle and reappeared at the appropriate time.

Then the pièce de résistance, a PacMan moved across the screen and gobbled the shuttle into nothingness.

I got an A.

But better than that, I triumphed over the task using BASIC and geometry. The loops moving the stars non-destructively behind the shuttle were nothing compared to the routines to open and close the PacMan's mouth as it moved across the screen. I remember how impressed my parents pretended to be when I showed them the print-out of the code.

I also remember how slow the program ran. It seemed everything was happening under water. I could almost make out each line of the PacMan's mouth closing drawing yellow then black again to open it as it devoured the space ship.

But then something amazing happened.

Our teacher, Mr. Ralph Nutter, who was my older brother's math teacher and swim coach a few years earlier, demonstrated all our projects in front of the entire class--but now they were compiled into machine language. The lift-off was smooth and the screen almost looked as though it were on fire. Most importantly, my PacMan moved across the screen so smoothly and cleanly the jagged resolution was invisible, and it seemed to race over the shuttle so gloriously I could hear the game's music playing inside my head.

And I was hooked.

That was 24 years ago and to this day, it is one of the single biggest life-changing events of my life. Almost everything that's happened to me since turned on what happened that last May in 1983, 4th hour, in the closing days of my last year in school.