Archive for July, 2011

My first computer experience was with a friend’s Altair do-it-yourself kit.

My first formal computer experience was the TRS-80, Model 1. We couldn’t wait to play with the brand new Model II, which had a floppy drive.

The first we owned was the Commodore VIC-20, then the 64. I remember typing programs in letter for letter from the back of “Compute!” magazine.

Back in those days, you didn’t have the space to be inefficient. And manual debugging was a pain in the rear.

We used to refer to “Spaghetti Code” as those programs that were patched together here and there, with no clear flow or documentation. As young programmers, we’d noodle around until we got something to work, even if we weren’t sure why. But you could pretty much forget about diving into someone else’s program and understanding it. More >