They come with mice?

In eight grade I heard about this thing BASIC. My junior high had these Friday short classes and along with other useful cultural educational activities like learning how to play Dungeons and Dragons and making a movie to Pink Floyd's "We don't need no education," I got to see a programming language. I wasn't impressed.

In ninth grade, unwilling to take algebra again (I had passed it, albeit barely) I got to spend one period in the basement with this roomful of administrative staff. Or perhaps they were CIA.

They had a Radio Shack TRS-80 And a book of BASIC programs. Fortunately I'd taken typing in seventh grade. But still, if I could have gotten away with reading instead, well, forget the keyboard.

I changed schools between ninth and tenth grade, got my dream job (stocking shelves in a used bookstore!). School had an Alpha Micro (wow! I could use this thing to write stories!) Mystepfather was working on a project using Apple II and Franklin Apple clone computers (wow! my brother and I could play Space Invaders on these things).

Still, I didn't get it. This was before the Internet, before War Games and around the time of 300 baud modems. What was the point? Programming was fun: we learned a structured BASIC and then Pascal, but still. Home was limited to writing BASIC programs that would disappear as soon as the computer was turned off.

And then, college. At last . . . VAX/VMS and email (I still have old files exhorting others to "Seeeeennnndddd Eeeemmmmaiiiilll" -- what was I thinking?) After a brief traumatic childhood experience with Unix and Emacs, I solidly joined the VAX/VMS camp. I had no concept of system programming, how operating systems worked–I just wanted to write stories, essays, and keep track of the books I owned.

Eventually the time came to look for work in the real world. I'd given up on physics and, in a blind stab at an alternative, selected English. At least I can claim to use my degree every day . . . I started learning Unix, because I knew that I'd have to. I got a job and continued learning and learned about this internet thing (which was more than just putting IN%" " around email addresses, it turned out) and I learned about computer networking.

Eventually this HTML stuff came along. "What do I do with this file," I asked my pet student after I received a document marked up in HTML. He was a big Hypercard fan and thought HTML was keen. "run lynx on it," he said and proceeded to convert all our LaTeX^? documentation to a sort of HTML superlanguage that he could parse into LaTeX^?? or HTML.

And now? Well, I'm always trailing the times. I've heard about this XML thing and I think I get why it's exactly what I want, but I haven't quite figured out what to do about it. I run MacOSX because deep inside, I know it's a NeXT^?. And websites? Well, let's face it, you aren't really reading this, are you? Doesn't that tell you something right there?

Preferences: Unix, MacOSX, WigWam . . . .
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