My First Programming Job

As well as I can remember (this would have been 1981) I met Patrick A. Alessi when I was 14 years old at NEECO. He was there purchasing an Apple II+ and an Epson MX-100 printer, and he told the sales guy there he needed a programmer to work on some business software. They pointed across the store at me. He told me later that he said, "Who, him? He's just a kid!" They introduced us to each other.

Turns out I knew his son Michael from playing kickball at the park down the street. Mr. Alessi lived a mere 4 blocks away from me, which was the perfect distance. So I began visiting his place. As first we just played pool and experimented with his new Apple II+, and Mr. Alessi made no apologies about sharing his political opinions while smoking different kinds of pipe tobacco.

Since my friend Richard had an Apple II computer I got some games from him, and I made a joystick for the computer out of parts I bought at Radio Shack. I reused the case from an RC car's remote control. I cut out the steering wheel and replaced it with a dual-potentiometer joystick. It was ugly, but I saved some money. ;-)

Mr. Alessi was interested in creating some trend following inventory management software, and he talked a lot about this. Eventually we would begin to write this software, and do a lot of other things as well. This was not going to make me much money in the short run, but I couldn't have asked for a better opportunity to learn.

Summer Break - My Own Company

When I was about 14 I decided to create my own company to create video games. I didn't even own a computer, but I spent a lot of time at NEECO, and they let me use theirs. The machine I targeted was the Commodore VIC-20, and I thought I was being clever when I came up with the name VinkSoft.

The game I created was a simple simulation of flying through an asteroid field. You needed to shoot the asteroids to destroy them or else they would hit your ship. It probably took a couple of dozen hours to create this game. The graphics on the VIC-20 were all done by creating custom graphics characters. Sound was pretty easy with the computer's built-in 3 voice tone generator and white noise generator. The actual BASIC code for the program wasn't very big because it all had to fit in 3.5K of RAM. The game was fast enough in BASIC that it didn't need any machine code routines.

My plan was to sell the software at NEECO, and the sales guys there agreed to do it. The software would be in a ziplock bag with some artwork and a cassette tape. A lot of software was sold this way back then. My father helped me with the artwork. He's pretty good at drawing sharp graphics, which makes sense because he spent thousands of hours drawing things at a drafting table.

So the sales guys at NEECO put the software on the wall (2 copies) with all the rest of the stuff there. Within a couple of days they had sold one! Unfortunately the owner of the company had not cleared this clandestine operation and when he found out he had my remaining copy pulled. I don't think they even gave it back to me.

The things we kids did during summer break. ;-)

Bad Cable

One day while I was hanging around at NEECO a man came in who needed a custom video cable for his VIC-20. The exact specification escapes me now, but the store didn't have what he needed. I volunteered to run down the street to You-Do-It Electronics and buy what we needed to make the cable. When I got back we tried to put the cable together, but no matter what we did the results were terrible. Creating video cables is not as simple as it would seem.

The VIC-20

In 1980 Commodore introduced a new 6502 based $299 home computer called the VIC-20. http://oldcomputers.net/vic20.html

It was essentially a version of the Commodore PET that plugged into a TV set. For the price there was nothing like it. It had Commodore BASIC built-in, color and sound, a joystick port, and a cartridge expansion slot. It didn't have graphical sprites, but it was still capable of video games and it cost about half the price of an Atari 400.

I wrote a lot of software for this machine at NEECO where I hung out. It didn't have full screen graphics, but you could program the graphics characters on the fly. It did have a very low screen resolution (22x23 text mode, 176x184 graphics mode) and it only came with 3.5K of available RAM out of the box, but we were very used to limited memory back then.

Compute! magazine had some really great software listings for this machine, like a graphics character editor for example and a machine code monitor. Just type it in and go. :-)

Artificial Intelligence and BASIC

When I was 13 or so years old I bought a book at You-Do-It Electronics titled Experiments in Artificial Intelligence for Small Computers, authored by John Krutch. This book influenced me in important ways. It teaches the essentials of AI so anyone could understand it. Examples are presented in the BASIC programming language. One of the examples presented is of the classic Eliza sort of conversational system. Not cutting edge research, but as a starter it gets the job done.

I was able to use the techniques in the book to create demos for the computers at NEECO. The customer would ask the computer about itself, and the computer would try and respond appropriately with a demonstration of features.

The book can still be purchased used on Amazon.

NEECO, a computer store

In the late seventees a computer store named NEECO moved from Springfield, MA to Needham, MA where I lived. I'm sure it was my brother Ernie who first brought me to the store. It was at least a two mile walk from our house, but we were in the habit of walking farther than that just to go to You-Do-It Electronics on the edge of town, so this was really nothing to us.

NEECO was to become a central influence in my life for a couple of years. What a store it was. I have many memories of the place.

When I first started visiting the store there were the following models I can remember:

• Apple II
• Commodore PET and CBM 8032
• Intertec Superbrain
• Hewlett Packard HP-85
• Atari 800 and 400

There was usually something fun running on each machine, especially the Apple and Atari computers. They also had a magazine rack and lots of software for sale.

I spent a lot of time there. Sometimes I was helpful to the people running the store, but I think they sometimes wish I was somewhere else. I owe them a debt of gratitude at least. ;-)