So the tagging phenomenon continues. I was tagged by Michelle Ufford (Twitter, Blog) in a meme that was started by Dennis Gobo (Twitter, Blog) asking the question about your first computer(s) and top 3 favorite games.

My very first computer at home was the TRS-80 Color Computer 2

That’s right. There isn’t a monitor. You hooked it up to your TV (In my case it was the basement/den TV… An old console TV from my grandmother’s house). I was probably around 7 or 8 when I was playing with it (it was 5/6 years old or so at the time.. came out in 80… I’m 30 now). I don’t remember much but I remember playing with BASIC or some form of it. I remember a couple simple programs that changed screen colors or moved a “ball” around the screen. I really lost a lot of my BASIC memory but I remember having to play with Peek, Poke and Sprites in some of these programs. That and I could make it beep.

A few years later, it was the C-64. (No picture needed, we all know it and most of those that played the tag here have a picture of one anyway). That was fun, I wrote my first few games from magazines. You buy the magazine and it has a long code syntax for the game, type it out, try to compile it, fix your errors, repeat and eventually you have a game.

The games that come to mind right away were:

• Blue Max – A “Flight Simulator”…  Altitude and heading.. Bombs and missions.. Landing had to be “just right”. It was fun and catchy. I think this was my “Airwolf” phase of life so naturally I enjoyed this game as a wee lad.
• Commando – I guess there is a theme emerging.. Blow stuff up..
• Summer Games – The Olympics.. It was fun playing with friends over.

I had a ton of games shared with friends. Cracker Jack was used, I am sad to report. Helped get over some of the now-archaic methods for licensing/copy control.

After the C-64 it was an 8088 based “PC” from IBM. Then a 386DX (with the turbo button.. why would anyone turn that off, btw???).. Now here I am..

Remember writing a BASIC program when I was in middle high school or maybe younger… It was “secure”.. You had to type in your password, if it was the hard-coded password you could get to the menu. Then the plan was to make this utility be a homework helper. I used INPUT and GOTO a lot to make the menus. There was flesh for all subjects but the only one I ever developed was the math homework… And that was really just a calculator using basic commands. Looking back, I bit off more than I could chew.. I mean what was I really expecting myself to program for History and English homework help?! Maybe it was through that horrifying experience of failure before the project was even unleashed that still makes me cringe at the thought of project management work to this day 😉

Not going to tag anyone, but if you post one, send a link to the comments here. I’ve enjoyed reading them thus far. Not going to syndicate this.. not really SQL Server related.. We’ll see who reads the feed direct from here vs. SQLServerPedia.Com 🙂