Et-Setera

Looking back, it is hard to believe how long I’ve been a computer programming geek.  Way back in February of 1984, I had my first game, Circus, published in Compute! magazine .  Thanks to Kevin Savetz, you can now see my original article as well as many other classic computer magazine articles .  These articles are back in the days before the internet, laptops and cell phones.  The iPhone in my pockets has so much more power and storage, that it is hard to imagine programming as I did in those days.

Circus VIC-20

Looking back at this article publication, there are a couple of things that make it particularly interesting to me 20+ years later.

• My original program was written on the Commodore VIC-20 (5K of user memory!) and was rewritten for all of the other computers for the publication .  This happened behind the scenes and I was unaware until publication.  Not surprising, they also rewrote all of my descriptive text.
• This game was a clone of a game that was available in arcades and pizza places around that same time.  Had I done this in present day, this game would very likely not have been published due to copyright or other legal issues.

20+ years later, I’m still a computer programmer (software engineer?).  While I program less than I used to, it is cool that my hobby so many years ago has been able to be both a hobby and a source of income for so many years.