I first got interested in computers when I was a little kid.  Watching Star Trek reruns every day after school probably had a lot to do with it. I knew that the computer on the Starship Enterprise wasn’t real, and I can’t honestly say I had much of an idea about what REAL computers were used for, but I figured that they must be pretty cool and I knew I wanted one. Unfortunately, this was the early ’70’s, and home computers didn’t really exist yet, other than expensive and complicated kits that nobody but an engineer would understand.

I was in junior high school when the first TRS-80 computers appeared at Radio Shack one summer in the mid-70’s. I think it had an 8-bit Z80 processor running at 1 megahertz with a total of 4 kilobytes of memory.

Finally, here was a REAL computer that was within reach. That summer, my friend Mark and I rode our bikes down to the store several times each week.  We’d sit at the keyboard and type in BASIC programs from the manual or one of the various books the store had for sale.  Fortunately, the store manager was sympathetic to our interests and was willing to let us play as long as we didn’t break anything or make a mess.  I think when school started again, Mark and I each had at least a dozen cassette tapes with saved programs on them.

The market for small computers was exploding. While most machines at that time were intended primarily for business, it wasn’t long before the first true “home” computers started to appear, such as the Apple and Apple II series, the Texas Instruments Ti99/4a, the Commodore Pet and Vic-20, and of course, the Atari 400/800 series. And then just a bit later, those machines were joined by the Commodore 64 and original IBM PC.

It took me awhile before I could afford to buy a computer of my own, but eventually I got the money together and bought my first computer, the Atari 400. This was in 1981, right in the middle of the first big video game boom.  I was a big video game fan, so a big part of my decision to get the Atari was the fact that it was backed up by the Atari game library.

But my first love on the computer had been programming, so after awhile I put the games aside, for awhile at least, and concentrated on learning everything about programming this machine that I could.  It wasn’t long before I had outgrown Atari BASIC and had moved onto writing assembly language code.

I wrote a variety of programs, each more sophisticated than the next, and I was just getting to the point where I thought I might be able to program computers for a living when Atari announced their new ST line of computers.

On the strength of some programming I’d done for the 8-bit Atari computers, I hooked up with a software/hardware developer who was looking to create some MIDI software for the new ST line.  We had two projects.  A patch editor/librarian for the Casio CZ-101 keyboard, which was a very popular, inexpensive MIDI keyboard, and a MIDI sequencer program.  Neither really ever made it past the experimental stage, as much larger companies were already coming out with their own ST software, but it opened the door to other things and I’ve been traveling down that path ever since.