It never ceases to amaze me how some little things can shape one’s life and, to some extent, define who we’ll be in the future. In my case, it was… A magazine.
The year was 1984. I was 10 years old, living in Barranquilla (Colombia), and up until then, my hobbies and interests were fairly standard: music, board games, sports (though I always liked baseball WAY better than soccer), comic books, and anime/cartoons on TV. One day my mom came home from the grocery store with a magazine, published originally in London, but translated to Spanish and reprinted in Spain, called “Mi Computer”(sic). She had bought it for me as I loved to read everything I could lay my hands on (a trait I had since I learned how to read at around 3 years of age, and that lives on to this day), and she thought that maybe I could get interested in these new things called “computers”. Boy, would I ever.
To say that I was hooked from the first paragraph would be an understatement. The subject grabbed my imagination in a way nothing (with the possible exception of rock music) had ever done before and, being a periodical publication, the wait for the arrival of the next issue was sometimes unbearable. I couldn’t wait to read more, so what I did was… read and re-read the issue(s) I had, while waiting for the next one.
Of course, for me, actually OWNING a computer on those days was next to impossible. There weren’t many resellers in Barranquilla, and the cost of even the simplest unit was astronomic (certainly way much more than we could afford). I was hooked, nonetheless, and so I read, and read again, everything I could. Sometimes I went to the largest bookshop in town and, not having any money to buy the few books about computers that they had, I simply read them there and then. I was, unconsciously, learning a lot of things by memory and imagination. It even got to the point where I had compared the specs on all the major competitors, ended weighing pros and cons and decided that my dream machine was the Apple IIe.
There was a Xerox distribution center in Barranquilla, and they were authorized resellers for Apple, so I went there one day and found out two things. One, that if Apple’s prices were high in the States, that was NOTHING compared to what they cost after adding importing/shipping fees, Xerox’s profit margin and converting US dollars to devaluated Colombian pesos, and two, that there was this brand-new just-released-in-the-States computer called the “Mac” that REALLY blew my mind. However, that one was priced in a totally different order of magnitude, which made it expensive even to dream about. It became, however, my holy grail (which explains why it has always been and always will be my platform of choice), but for the time being I would remain an Apple IIe fan (though I was destined to never own one).
My first computing break came at school, when the next year they added computing primer to the curriculum and, at last, the day came when I could finally be sitting in front of an actual computer. That day everybody in my class was in an uninterested state of mind. For them it was just another boring subject to be graded on. When we finally entered the lab, I’m not very proud to say that my first feeling was… disappointment. Of course, the computers bought (rented?) by the school were the ones at the very bottom of my comparison list: the Texas Instruments’ TI 99/4A. Beggars can’t be choosers, however, and I quickly got past that. We were seated in pairs, as there were not enough computers to have one for each of us, but no one was really interested in the damn things. The teacher started by explaining a bit of computer theory (which I already knew), and that lost everybody in a fairly short order. Everybody then just started experiencing the novelty of seeing every key pressed and every (curse) word typed appear on the screen, so I was left to my own devices. After all that reading and re-reading, I had memorized all the BASIC listings I had come across, but as I didn’t know how much time I had with the computer, I chose a very small one. It was a very silly little thing that made it look like the computer was wrong. I typed it from memory (I now have PDFs of all the issues of that magazine, so I could just look it up, but I don’t need to, as it’s still seared in my memory):
10 REM THE COMPUTERS ARE NEVER WRONG
20 PRINT “PLEASE ENTER A NUMBER”
30 INPUT A
40 LET A = A + 1
50 PRINT “I THINK THE NUMBER YOU ENTERED WAS “
60 PRINT A
70 END
Of course, this code just asks you for a number, adds one to that number, and tells you the now “wrong” number, making it look (if you didn’t read the code or didn’t understand BASIC) as if the computer had made a mistake. I ran it, it failed as I had a typo on line 60, I debugged it and ran it again, when it worked as it should. While doing all this, I was not aware that all the noise on the lab had died away. I was just focused on getting the computer to do something. Once I realized that all was silent, I turned around to see all the class piled up behind me, staring at me as if I was a mad scientist. The only approving eyes were my teacher’s, who was smiling and asked me how I had done that. I explained and she asked me some questions about BASIC. I answered all of them and she told me that I already knew more than what she was planning to teach us the entire year, so from then on I was exonerated of every assignment and I became her assistant teacher for the class. She began lending me instruction manuals from the computers at her regular workplace (she was only a part-time teacher), and so I began learning about mainframes and COBOL, which came in handy some years later, when I landed my first job.
Since then, computers have been a part of my daily life and my bread and butter, so now, living in another continent and working at one of the biggest software companies in the world, I think the moral of this story is twofold: First, as the saying goes, “when there’s a want, there’s a will”, so never stop pursuing your dreams, and if they seem either impossible or like the odds are too stacked against you, make do with whatever you have and keep moving forward. Second, never stop learning. Nothing you learn is ever useless, and you never know which doors will open for you in the future.
