I lived with my parents in the backwater town of Longmont Colorado, in a tiny little house on East 4th Ave. and Lashley St.

My next-door neighbor, Philip, and I had been playing Dungeons and Dragons down in his basement for like four years at this point, and I had created an entire world for us to adventure in. Another friend of mine lived just up the road, at Lashley and 5th, in a trailer just outside the Dickens barn that his family managed. He was a bit of a metalhead and got me into bass guitar.

Fun fact; the Dickens barn was moved, in one piece, across town in 1996. This was to make way for a subdivision, but the barn still stands and is now a reception hall / music venue.

Anyway, outside of D&D and whatnot I’d been spending a lot of time in the vacant field on the east side of Lashley on my metal-flake gold and white Schwinn Stingray Fastback – you know the one, with the gear lever mounted in the middle like a 70’s stick-shifter…

While this sounds cool now, it wasn’t back then – the whole world had moved on to BMX bikes a year or so back and I got a lot of jeers from the popular kids for the huge handlebars and banana seat…

Luckily the bike wasn’t super reliable, so I wound up walking the mile or so back and forth to school most of the time. It was a nice walk though; just north up Lashley to east Mountain View Ave. I also walked up there a lot to go to the Centennial community pool.

A couple of years back I drove up to Longmont, parked near the old house, and re-did the walk… It’s a lot longer at 50 than it was when I was 12…

Anyway, 1981 is the year I started the 7th grade. So, it was my first year at Northeast Jr. High…

It was an okay school; one of those new floorplan things where all of the walls were like huge, carpeted cube walls on tracks so the classroom sizes and locations could be adjusted dynamically.

I have a few fond memories of the time in junior high; like all of the chairs for the classrooms were those 70’s style plastic stackable ‘bucket seat’ skid-base things. Like this:

We quickly discovered that by applying a little paraffin wax to the runners under the chair, you could slide about a hundred yards on the Berber carpet in one with a good push. There were also unspoken competitions to see who could lean back and balance in one for the longest…

This was also the beginning of the portable LCD-based game era, and everyone who was anyone had some Casio / Timex / Nelsonic / Tiger / etc. game on their wrist or in their pocket while I was in junior high.

Oh, and Bloom County took the world by storm in the early 80’s; Bill the Cat and Opus were on everything…

Anyway, the new school was right next door to Loma Linda, the elementary I attended for a bunch of years, so I was pretty familiar with the area and had a bunch of friends going there.

The walk to school went past a small shopping center at 9th and Lashley; the 7-11 is still there, though the bins of penny candy are gone. Back in the early 80’s there was an arcade across the parking lot where I spent most of my lunch money; the hot games at the time were Defender, Donkey Kong, Galaga, and Tempest… I spent soooo much money on Tempest it’s not even funny.

Across the street to the north of the 7-11 is the huge Trend Homes plant. It was turned into a YMCA back in the late 70’s, but before that they built most of the houses in the area in that building.

Just past the YMCA on Lashley is the Longmont Rec Center where the yearly battle of the bands happened.

But before I got to the rec center, I would turn off onto the bike path and cut across the park to get to school. Clark Centennial Park is pretty huge and it was nice – but I never really spent any time there… I was far too preoccupied with my roleplaying games and computers to spend time hanging out in a park.

Speaking of games, I was in the “games club” at school, which was run by my science teacher, Steve Shultz.

He was pretty awesome and was definitely my favorite teacher during all of my school years; he had a life-size dud bomb painted fire engine red in the classroom, and he once took all of the folding tables he could find and created a cave system full of back-lit overhead projector images of minerals we had to crawl through.

But for “games club” he did a yearly event where we would get people to sponsor us to play games for 24 hours straight at school… It was a lock-in thing where we got pizza and soda to play games non-stop from Friday at 5pm to Saturday at 5pm – and people would actually donate money to the school for it. Hehe.

I was also a huge music freak back then, and on top of being a fan of all of my father’s ‘dad rock’ like Jethro Tull, Santana, Cream, The Beatles, and other 60’s era staples, I was also into more modern rock like the just released Rush “Moving Pictures” album. Tunes from Styx, Foreigner, REO Speedwagon, and others were favorites. I was also starting to get into New Wave and had a couple of albums from bands like The Police and Flock of Seagulls.

To listen to this plethora of music I had a really old hand-me-down AM/FM receiver complete with wooden sides, an equally old record player, an 8-track deck, and a pair of really old paper-cone speakers that took care of my music needs. I just had to make sure it was never heard upstairs…

My room at home was in the basement of the house – in the north-west corner next to the stairs. It wasn’t bad; it had a checkerboard tile floor, and my mom painted the walls in a very 70’s scifi sort of color scheme… Kinda like this:

So, it matched all of the computer stuff in my room from the era.

Computers were a big deal in 1981. My dad had an OSI-Challenger and a TRS-80 model 1 for a couple of years, but like everything else in the house – I wasn’t allowed to touch either of them under any circumstances.

At school though, there were four Commodore PET machines in vacant a corner office, and no one did anything with them. They had clear dust covers on them when I found them, leading me to guess that A) even the teachers didn’t have any idea how to use them and B) that meant it was okay for me to monkey with them.

Remember, this is the mimeograph and overhead transparency era, so something like a personal computer just didn’t fit into the curriculum – yet.

I would spend the occasional recess in that corner office figuring out the vagaries of loading things from tape and playing with the classroom programs the machines came with.

Eventually though, with relentless pestering, my dad finally caved and bought me a Sinclair ZX-81 for Christmas of 1981. The ZX-81 was a $99 kit, which is about three hundred dollars in 2022 money, and that really got me started on both hardware and software systems. I also became even more of a social outcast by adding ‘geek’ to my already well-worn ‘nerd’ moniker from being a gamer – but that’s fine.

I found that I had a legitimate talent with computers, and by the end of my first month I’d written my first text adventure based on my D&D world… The problem with the ZX81 is it had no storage when I got it, so everything I wrote I wrote on paper and typed in every time I wanted to run it.

My dad eventually gave me his old Radio Shack portable cassette recorder, and I got that plugged into the ZX81 to save and load stuff.

The Space Shuttle launch in April was cool. My dad worked at Beech Aircraft, which was a division of Raytheon, on Shuttle stuff. So, the house was full of weird little bits of Shuttle tech or memorabilia.

By May, the routine showing off of things I’d written prompted my dad to get me a 16K ram expansion and an actual keyboard for the ZX-81, and by summer I had filled my big tape case with software I’d written for the thing.

1982

1982 was more of the same really.

My dad was kind of a workaholic, so several of my birthdays had been spent at Beech in and around the test and engineering facility. This is where I got my first real taste of computing power, because I’d get to spend time with some incredibly expensive HP series 200 machines. 1982’s model was the 9826, which used a 68000 CPU and 2MB of ram and made the Z80 in my Sinclair seem like an abacus…

I did manage to score a Commodore VIC-20 sometime in 1982; I want to say it was a birthday present from my Grandmother… The VIC-20 was a $299 machine, which is roughly a grand in 2022 dollars – so it was a pretty impressive thing to have.

The VIC was where things really started to take off for me with computers; it had a pretty decent processor that was the emerging industry standard (6502), enough ram to be useful, a nice keyboard, and enough bells and whistles to be entertaining to write things for.