“When Did Computers Lose the Fun?”
I was looking through a bunch of old computer magazines and articles over the last week trying to see if I could find something interesting in the archive of old technology to share with you this week, when I made an interesting discovery. There was once a time when it was fun to learn to program a computer; you can look back in time to the early 1980s when there were almost as many computer manufacturers as there were computers. Everyone was trying to get into the brand new market of home computers, and nearly everyone building them was using something different. My best friend had an Apple II, I had the Commodore 64, and another friend had an IBM of some kind, which I don’t remember at the moment. However, the thing I do remember is that we could not share files with each other at all, except through either printing them out, or sending them to each other over the phone line as a text file.
Ironically both the Apple II and my Commodore 64 had a MOS technologies 6502 CPU, but the different layouts of the computers and the different implementation of the operating systems made them completely incompatible with each other. We wrote our own terminal program that let us type messages back and forth over the phone lines, but we each had to write our own program that shared data the same way, because my program would not run on his computer and his would not run on mine. So I lived through a time when, if you wanted to do something with your computer, you either wrote the program yourself or found a friend able to write one.
As it turned out, the Commodore 64 (being much less expensive) took the market by storm and had a huge following of programmers. The computer was first produced in 1979 and sometime around 1983, “Compute Gazette Magazine” was first published. It contained software written by readers and chosen by the editor to be included in each issue. In the early issues the programs were all written in Commodore 64 BASIC, which meant that if you had the User’s Manual, you could read the code and understand exactly what the software was doing. For me this meant that I could help my friend rewrite the software for his Apple because we knew both forms of BASIC. It was great and we loved sharing games with each other. He got free games from “Byte” magazine, which was focused on Apple and TRS-80 systems, and shared them with me. We both learned to write our own games as well. Computers were fun and educational.
Sometime around 1985 “Compute Gazette” magazine became much more commercial and the software in the magazine began being published in Commodore machine language, which meant it was just a series of numbers that were loaded into memory locations. You could not easily see what the program was designed to do or how to convert it to another system type. A large part of the fun was gone; you couldn’t easily modify the games or share them with friends that had different computers. My friend and I learned machine language and still managed to share the games; in some aspects it was easier because machine language runs directly on the processor, so the machine language itself was the same between Commodore and Apple, but the memory locations were different so we had to load the codes into different addresses to make it work. That same year “Compute Gazette” started publishing a disk containing the programs from the magazine, meaning you didn’t have to type the programs any more.
I think the disks were the next step in losing some of the fun; what used to take the full month until the next issue—typing each program one and a time, debugging it from typing mistakes, and running it—now could be done in a few minutes per program. We tried them all on the first day and then had to wait a month for new free software. The computer sat idle more often than before, and we no longer learned anything from typing the games. Most of the fun was gone, but at least we still had the monthly magazine to look forward to.
In 1995, the fun of the home computer met its end. The internet became more prominent, the printed magazines went online and published new games and content weekly, if not even daily, and we had an endless supply of information, games and articles. This to me was the beginning of the end. Now instead of learning by typing our software, reading manuals and modifying games and utilities to do what we want, we just ask ChatGPT, Claude AI, or CoPilot and go to work. Those of us who still write our own software are used by the AI so it can learn from us. We become the teachers and the computers become the students. I would argue that we also lost a lot of the fun. That is why I have brought my Commodore out of the box in the attic and pulled out copies of the old magazines. My teenage boys think it is really cool that games used to come in magazines and think it would be fun to make the game for themselves from the print on a paper, and I think they would learn a lot more. Until next week, stay safe and learn something new.
Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to shamilton@techshepherd.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.
