There was a nice post about Childhood Computing on Hacker News the other day. It got me thinking about my own experiences and their relationship with what came later.
I had an Amiga 1000, tucked away in the basement of our suburban Virginia home. The basement had orange shag carpet and wood panels on the walls with posters of various European cities where my parents had traveled or lived before I was born.
My memory is a little hazy but I’m guessing I used the Amiga a lot roughly between the ages of 9 and 14. My father bought it for me. I was spoiled as an upper-middle class only child.
I experimented with programming on the Amiga, but in truth I didn’t have the patience for it. Or for using the groundbreaking Deluxe Paint. My mom’s go-to story about the Amiga is how I programmed it to say “Kill the one called Betsey!” Sorry Mom!
Mainly I played games. I found Arctic Fox too conceptual and Marble Madness too frustrating. I played Sword of Aragon, It Came from the Desert, and North & South when I could convince a friend to play. I remember loving the open aspect of early Sid Meier games like Pirates! I spent hours and hours on my own weird side quests in games like Empire and Sim City. But, I probably played Lemmings more than any other game. I can vividly remember the smell of the Amiga, the feel of the mouse, and the sound of tens of Lemmings screaming “Oh no!” as I blew them up.
For those unfamiliar, Lemmings is a game where you give instructions to a bunch of Lemmings to help them escape various mazes.
Years later, I applied for a job at the National Security Agency. Not-so-fun fact: they were the biggest employer of math majors in the country at the time. My interviewer said it was a positive that I had spent so much time playing games like Lemmings and Sim City. It did teach me the art of puzzle solving.
I’m sure my father hoped for such an outcome. I say above that I was spoiled, but this was particularly true when it came to electronics and/or anything remotely associated with learning, especially STEM learning. Fun fact: my father developed something like LaTeX before there was LaTeX and attempted to advertise it on internet message boards.
The Amiga ultimately got replaced by casual sports and basement talking sessions with friends, board games, ski trips, and, a TurboGrafx-16. We had eclectic electronics in the house. I also went through a phase where I became very interested in geography, history, and writing. I took Russian History and Russian language courses in summers in high school. What a weird kid.
So I didn’t have the childhood typical of a Hacker News contributor. I didn’t love STEM and didn’t love the computer as a computer. But I enjoyed tinkering and puzzle solving. Maybe my experience is more typical of a Data Science profile versus the Software Engineer profile you mainly find on Hacker News? I still yearn for a life where I’m not staring at a computer all the time, to be honest. In any event, my father gave me a way to tinker and puzzle solve using a computer. He helped me become tech savvy well before it was trendy to do that. I hope I can set my boys up for success like this.