Interestingly, my enlisted time coincided with a period of intense change for the Navy. Also, the military is truly the land of overused acronyms, so I’ll try to put meaning to any alphabet soup that ends up in this.

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When June rolled around I’d been talking to the recruiter for a month regarding various rates and GI Bill things. But being as I was only 17, I needed my parents to sign a waiver before I could enlist…

This turned out to be easier than I thought it would be, and if I was a tiny bit more cynical I’d guess they saw it as an easy out to get rid of me. Anyway, I took the ASVAB in June and scored well enough to get into any advanced technology rate I was interested in…

Initially I was angling toward the Navy’s Nuclear Power Program, but after hearing some of the horror stories of the schools involved, I passed on it. For example, everything is classified so there is no note taking in class – you have to hardcore memorize all of the formulas while not getting any sleep because if you’re not in class you’re standing watches. I also didn’t figure training to run a reactor will lead to a very large pool of jobs post-Navy.

I eventually settled on Radio – specifically in submarines.

Submarine radio makes heavy use of computer systems, electronics, and has the added bonus of a top-secret security clearance – which I’d heard will be a golden ticket when my four years are up. And submarines are about as close as anyone can get to space travel without being an astronaut, and I was pretty jazzed about that too.

Eventually, on July first, 1986, I raised my right hand and became wholly owned by the United States Navy.

For the next eight weeks I attended RTC (Recruit Training Command – bootcamp) in Great Lakes Illinois, which while it wasn’t ‘bad’, it isn’t something I’d like to do again. I quickly discovered the secret to bootcamp success was to basically become a robot; do what you’re told to do exactly as you’re told to do it even if it’s wrong.

And, in my 17 year old super-genius opinion, they were wrong – a lot – so it was incredibly frustrating to stop thinking and just follow orders.

Our first two RDCs (Recruit Division Commander – essentially drill sergeants) were replaced about two weeks into it, and the second pair of RDCs were either missing entirely or were trying to sell us embroidered company jackets and other stuff. I guess they were trying to capitalize on the elation of success much like class rings and yearbooks…

The latter two RDCs for my company were actually taken to captain’s mast for this as we were shipping out… Welcome to the Navy I suppose.

Anyway, bootcamp passed in a blur; marching, medical, marching, PT, marching, classes, marching, service week, marching… But it was soon over, and I was standing at parade rest for an hour at graduation. My company was one of the last to use the old WWII era barracks building we occupied, which would be a huge quality of life boost for the companies that came after us.

My parents showed up for graduation as they were on the way to Ohio to visit with my grandfather, so we chatted for a half an hour or so before they needed to get going.

The next day I hopped into a rented limo with a half-dozen guys from my company, all in dress uniforms, and we headed into Chicago.

I bailed on them as soon as things turned to hookers and whatnot, preferring to walk about downtown for a bit; I stood next to the Sears tower, looked up, and got vertigo – and then did a little shopping before getting a cab back to base… I picked up a Casio “World Time” wristwatch because I could end up anywhere on the planet, and a Sony Walkman WM10 because it was slightly smaller than a cassette tape and I’d been told space was a premium onboard a submarine.

On the 3rd of September, 1986, I checked in at the subbase in Groton Connecticut and moved into the newly built seven story Thresher Hall barracks building. Thresher Hall was an incredible step up from the buildings in use at Great Lakes and was, in many ways, reminiscent of my old High School, Skyline. The rooms were nice and furnished with new GSA (General Services Administration) wood furniture, my roommate was pretty cool, and there was a literal arcade in the commons area on the fifth floor.

Being as my BESS (Basic Enlisted Submarine School) class wouldn’t begin until the 30th of October, I was placed in a TDU (Temporary Duty Unit) that reported to the parking lot at a building just down the hill to the south of Thresher Hall every morning. From there we would be assigned various busy-work projects ranging from cleaning some space (space: Navy term for a room) somewhere to lawn maintenance.

I participated in this for about a week before discovering that the daily rollcall was a green-bar printout of a list managed from a PC-XT running DOS in an open office located in the above-mentioned building. And that the list was updated daily as sailors moved into or out of classes with no real oversight, access controls, or change management.

Ten minutes later I had removed myself from said list – and then spent the next two weeks before BESS walking around the base, hanging out in my barracks room, or playing video games in the common area.

My BESS class took place at the McNeill Hall Submarine School, and was the last class to be held there as the new BESS building, Bledsoe Hall, opened for the next class in December.

BESS was simultaneously very interesting and incredibly boring. Learning about things like CORD (cascade orificial resistive device) which are used to reduce hydraulic cavitation noise was fascinating for the 15 minutes it took to explain it, but then there was the other 4.75 hours needed to make sure everyone else understood it that bored me to no end.

It was during BESS that I have my first security clearance meeting with a couple of NIS (Naval Investigative Service) folks. This is where I was asked all sorts of uncomfortable questions and then asked to provide contact information for family and friends… Unknown to me, for a top-secret clearance they interview you, your family, your friends, and friends of your friends… It’s incredibly thorough.

Anyway, BESS was six weeks long and ended mid-November, at which time I moved into the TDU for SUBGROUP2 while waiting for SSBN 735 to reach a point where people were needed. This also meant that I moved from the very modern Thresher Hall across the base to the 60’s era Scorpion Hall, and I was an actual submariner now.

One of the nicer things with being an actual submariner is that I could leave the base. So, after buying a few polo shirts, a pair of jeans, and some new sneakers at the base exchange, I started hitching rides over to the Crystal Mall over near New London and other places out in town – like the comics shop…

I also started standing watches at the Group 2 buildings, which aren’t as regimented as bootcamp and I got some time to catch up on a few comics; “Unicorn Isle” was a big favorite at the time, with its curious blend of high fantasy and science fiction…

It was about then that I had my second interview with the NIS folks for my clearance. This one is where they asked me about what they discovered… I spent a good half an hour explaining role playing games and how it was just a hobby and not a lifestyle. Yes, they even found out that I played D&D…

I did eventually convince them that I wouldn’t sell out the US for a really cool set of polyhedron dice though, and I got my clearance.

Finally, Christmas rolled around, and I took a week of leave to head home in early-December – I wasn’t high enough rank to actually take Christmas week off, but I could get close… When I got home, I discovered that my parents had sold or disposed of pretty much everything I owned except my computer and a few bits of clothing.

I packed up the few things I had left and took them back to Connecticut with me.

Once I made it back to the base, I discovered just how lucrative taking duty for guys on leave could be; I think I made an extra $1200 a week that December… It was enough that I figured I’d just not take Christmas leave again for the duration of my contract.

Anyway, now that I was settled into Scorpion Hall and seriously doubted my drunken roommate would do much more than sleep, I unboxed my Atari 800XL and got back to my programming efforts between duty rotations.

1987

One fond memory I have was on one of the routine trips to the Crystal Mall. It was January and it had snowed a fair bit, and one of my buddies had an older Bronco II… So, we decided to go snow-bashing… This is a pastime where you find a place with a big parking lot that has piled up snow into small mountains, and your job is to redistribute that snow back into the parking lot without getting arrested.

We did this for a bit before getting noticed by the mall cops in their K-car, and let them chase us around a bit in as much as the no-traction sedan could muster. We eventually get high-centered on a mountain of snow though, and I’m out in front to the Bronco pushing as my friend rocks it back and forth and the mall cops slowly approach… We did manage to get free and scoot out of the mall parking lot by the skin of our teeth though.

I remember Europe’s “The Final Countdown” was playing in the truck at the time. Apropos I suppose.

It was right after this that I decided to pick up a late Christmas present for myself at the base exchange; a Panasonic RX-CD70.

I think this was about $500 in 1987 dollars ($1200 in 2022), but it was worth every penny…

After acquiring a CD player, I started acquiring CDs. At the time I was very much into ‘new age’ and was collecting NARADA stuff pretty heavily, and this prompted me to get a cheap Casio keyboard and learn to play a bit.

In February I acquired a $100 Chevy Citation from another sailor who was shipping out. It lasted about a month before the input shaft on the transaxle disintegrated.

In March I acquired a $250 Chevy Chevette from another sailor who was shipping out, and it was pretty reliable. Apparently $250 was the least you could spend for reliable transportation in 1987.

It was the 17th of April, 1987, when my duty station changed once again; this time to General Dynamics – Electric Boat (E.B.) in Groton – about ten miles from the base.

Here’s a handy map to visualize things:

My new barracks was a building right near the south entrance to E.B.

It was new but was also little more than a two-tone brown corrugated steel outbuilding converted into a shared berth, communal showers, a laundry room, and a break room.

The beds were the bunk-bed style things from bootcamp, as were the lockers between each set of beds. This means there wasn’t a lot of storage, so I sold my keyboard and my Atari 800XL, boxed up my comics and the art I’d been doing in my free time, grabbed my CD collection along with the boom box, and headed for my new barracks.

When I arrived at E.B., there was literally no one to check in with, so on May 7th, 1987, I arrived aboard PCU Pennsylvania {SSBN 735}. This is when I discover that I am the second person to arrive – the first being the Yeoman I checked in with… The USS Pennsylvania, for the time being, was a floating navy barge that had been converted into office spaces and tied up a short walk from the barracks.

For the first month or so it was just me and two other guys in the barracks. One of the other guys had an Apple Macintosh which he had set up in the break room, and this is my first exposure to a desktop GUI and a 68000 CPU that wasn’t dedicated to scientific research – the machine was literally magical, and I now really wanted one… But they were still too expensive for me.

(Hi, it’s me from the future – I finally have one!)

Most of my time at E.B. was spent working on my submarine qualifications, working on my radioman rate exams, working on the new IR² (Integrated Radio Room) system that 735 is pioneering, getting the daily traffic (teletype hardcopies – like primitive email) from the subbase and delivering it to our temporary radio office on the barge, standing watches on 735, and countless other odd jobs as required.

The radio room made use of a couple Sperry/Univac AN/UYK-20 computers which were really primitive… You bootstrapped them with a series of toggle switches to set bits, and then a momentary that set that register in magnetic core memory. Once booted the system interfaced to a tape drive, but to get there you basically carved commandments into stone tablets… There was a couple of AN/UYK-43‘s as well, which had cool amber gas plasma displays and used tape, but I didn’t use those as much as the Yuck 20’s.

The daily traffic runs were interesting… I’d leave the south lot of E.B. in my Chevette at about 0500, arrive at the base at about 0515, check in at the radio room on base to receive and sign for all of the communications that came in since yesterday morning, then head back to E.B. and get everything ready for the day by 0600.

To do this I had a lanyard full of ID cards, about a dozen total, for everything from access to the base, E.B., the assembly area for the boat, and the radio building on base, as well as my security clearance IDs – one of which allowed me to assume control of any police officer anywhere for an immediate lights-on escort to the nearest base.

And standing watch on a submarine that was still being built was essentially science fiction you can wander around. When I stood watch on the 735 at E.B. there were still accessways in the sides of the boat and large sections of the hull rings were still being assembled. All of the interior spaces were still full of temporary lighting and wiring, piping, ventilation, etc. was strung everywhere… On watch my Navy issue “dog bowl” was replaced with a hardhat that I’d artistically embellished a bit and wasn’t regulation in the slightest.

One of the aft ballast tanks had my name and a little unicorn painted on one wall as well… I’m sure it’s been stripped and painted since though… We got away with a lot at E.B. because our command was still being put together and there wasn’t a lot of supervision.

I spent Christmas 1987 standing watches for other sailors and making a ton of extra cash.

1988

For the most part, my life centered around the 735 and getting the radio room ready to go. And christening and launch day was coming up – which would be a full-dress event. I was still working on my submarine qualifications, which was a bit tricky given that some of the systems I needed to qualify on were still being built.

On an early morning on the 23rd of April 1988, I endured the most detailed inspection of my entire military career. Once my Master Chief was satisfied, and my Captain was satisfied, and some Admiral was satisfied, we filed onto the pier to stand at either attention or parade rest for several hours while a bunch of ‘important people’ talked about ‘important things’.

I kinda zoned out and don’t remember much of it…

Eventually the USS Pennsylvania was smacked with a bottle of champagne, the crowds were shuffled off, and the 735 was left all alone, floating next to SSBN 736…

Being as we were all dressed up and had nowhere to go, the crew posed for a couple of photos.

With 735’s launch came a small change of command; up to this point Captain Oltraver has been in charge of us, but he was retiring after launching the Pennsylvania, and we were getting a new captain.

And now that the boat was in the water, reactor things started to happen which meant we needed our reactor crews…

In May I met up with Doug Aubenque, one of the newly arrived nuclear engineering folks on the 735. It turned out that he, too, was into roleplaying games and through him I was introduced to Bill Whitehouse, Brian Dorricott, and John Flaherty – and we collectively adventured our way across whatever fantastic setting caught our attention.

Bill and John were in the barracks at the sub-base, and no one could get into E.B. without clearance – so our gaming nights were at the subbase for the first few months.

I got a bump in paygrade in July, which was my two-year anniversary, and I got a chance to move to a place in-town… Doug and Brian had a 1 bedroom place over in New London and Brian was shipping out, leaving Doug the place – so I packed up to move.

In August I moved to a rundown apartment ‘in town’; 177 Jefferson Ave, #2 in New London.

It was a 1-bedroom place where Doug got the bedroom in the back and I got the living room in the front… Navy guys are accustomed to small, shared spaces, so this living arrangement wasn’t odd in the slightest. And once Doug and I had the apartment, some of our gaming nights moved there.

When I moved in, I didn’t have anything at all to my name other than my car, my boom box, and a small box of knickknacks – so the first order of business was using the increased space to start building a nice stereo system for myself.

My typical day after moving was getting up at 0500, getting over to the base by 0530 to pick up traffic, then to E.B. by 0600. I’d then do navy stuff until 1800 or so, drive back over to the base and get dinner at the chow hall, and then either head over to the barracks or the apartment for some gaming for a few hours before calling it a night at 2300.

The thing with being in the Navy was “remain flexible” as you’re just a small cog in a big machine, and that machine doesn’t care one iota what your plans are… So, some nights we’d go long at the base and I’d find an open barracks room to crash in, and do the above routine from there. And about once a week I’d end up on some late night watch on the boat where I’d crash at the barracks at E.B. and do the above routine from there.

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It was one of these late night watches where I was returning from a walk around the pier and was headed up the aft gangway to take the aft LET (Logistics Escape Trunk) down to maneuvering (the control room for the reactor, power, and propulsion) to log the tour.

The boat was having the “patch” over the reactor checked out to verify the welds after fueling. The steel hull of a submarine is understandably pretty thick and made of some pretty advanced steel, and welding that is a pretty specialized skill. And the QA of this requires a high-power radioactive “camera”.

As I was approaching the LET I hear a loud CLANK, CLANK, CLANG – SPLASH followed by an equally loud FUCK! from the cordoned off area over the reactor. I then hear one E.B. guy tell another that they just lost a 100 curie cobalt-60 source over the side…

I continue on my way, head down the trunk and wander into maneuvering where the nuke folks live. I casually say “Hey, guys, how dangerous is a 100 curie cobalt-60 source?”

The bust out a couple of calculators and start giving me exposure distance and time numbers, then pause and ask “why?”

“Oh, they just lost one over the side” I say deadpan as I wave a thumb at the outside of the boat.

About 5 seconds pass as they process this, and then they all explode into motion to do measurements of everything before the NRC showed up.

I chuckled and continued on to make my log entry.

E.B. had to bring in this specialized diver guy and pay him some obscene dollars per hour to go get the thing – fortunately the shutter on the source had closed and there wasn’t any excessive radiation to create three-eyed fish.

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The next big event for the boat would be sea trials next year, and then commissioning, and once the boat was commissioned it’d be moving to King’s Bay Georgia.

I had decided that because my time at E.B. was counting as ‘sea time’ and I would hit my two-year sea/shore rotation in July of 89, I’d rotate back to the subbase and take a bunch of computer and electronics classes before deciding if I want to re-up for another four years.

Doug wouldn’t hit his rotation for another year or so and would therefore have to move with the 735 after commissioning. So, it’s decided that I’ll take over the apartment when Doug leaves, move to the bedroom, and someone else would move into the living room.

1989

The next couple of months were a blur as both the 735 and I lurched towards Sea Trials.

Sea Trials are where you take the boat out to the hundred fathom curve, submerge, and then do some angles and dangles (navigation maneuvers) while making sure the boat doesn’t leak and everything works. it’s also an interesting method of doing Q.A. in that about two dozen E.B. folks who worked on the boat go out with it. So, someone who did the welding is actually in the boat when that weld is subjected to hundreds of pounds per square inch of pressure.

Sea Trials happened on June 3rd…

The boat passed sea trails with flying colors… I mean, we did find a toolbox one of the E.B. folks left in the overhead on emergency blow, which was exciting. And I learned that sleeping on a Mk48 torpedo is perfectly acceptable if you’re tired enough.

With the Sea Trials out of the way I finally finish my submarine qualifications and get everything signed off on June 23rd. It’ll be a week or two for all of the ink to dry and paperwork to get shuffled though, so to celebrate I buy tickets to the Doobie Brother’s show in Danbury on July 2nd.

My Chevette is starting to show its age though and isn’t super reliable for long trips anymore, so I borrow Brian’s Z24 Cavalier for the trip. On the drive there and back I loop Queensryche’s “The Warning” on cassette about a dozen times.

On July 7th my official squid papers come in…

And I spend the day getting my dolphins ‘tacked on’, which is a ritual hazing thing.

See, the dolphins are a pin, and once you get them pinned to your uniform, everyone you run into that day punches them – impaling the pins in your chest over and over.

And, being smarter than the average bear, I had prepared a special dungaree shirt for the event and stashed it in the office… I’d bought a dolphin pin at the base, clipped off the stabby bits, and used some milspec black adhesive to affix them to a shirt. So, after the pinning ceremony I quickly retreated to the office and changed shirts, and the resulting pummeling wasn’t too bad.

I have both the dolphins I was presented and my cheater dolphins – I think I value the latter more as they saved me a lot of pain.

On July 16th, 1989, my duty station switched back to Groton, where I started radio, electronics, and computer classes. So, I was either in class, holding down a desk, or standing watch somewhere most days of the week.

In August I traded in my “Little Red Chevette” as the down payment on a 1989 Chrysler Le Baron. It’s my first new car and I’m absolutely in love with the thing. I immediately rip out the stock 6×9’s in the back deck and the 6″ers in the doors and replace the lot with Infinity Kapas.

It was well after dark on Sunday, September 3rd, 1989, in New London when I returned to the apartment after a 16-hour day at the base. Doug and Brian had spent the weekend up in Boston at WorldCon.

When I arrived home, there were a half dozen people in the living room / my bedroom having a grand old time finishing some adventure they’d started at the convention. This adventure was being run by “Canth” who was being attended by her boyfriend Pete (Kreiger), and there were two other new folks there as well. One was another submariner who went by “T”, I don’t think I ever got the other fellow’s name…

Anyway, being tired and cranky I pulled Doug aside and pointed out that I was tired and cranky and would really appreciate some peace and quiet. His response was that they had found this GM and she was the greatest thing since sliced pre-wrapped peanut butter, and that I should join in.

I snorted derisively; an amazing GM eh? I’ll be the judge of that…

I didn’t get any sleep that night and was a literal zombie in classes at the base the following day.

I’d also met my future ex-wife.

On September 9th the 735 was commissioned, which involved Greenpeace and water cannons. Being as I wasn’t part of the crew anymore; I wasn’t there for the commissioning. And a week later the 735 was gone.

It was about two weeks before my ex and I had hooked up and it took another few weeks for Pete to move on and stop hanging out in the back stairwell of the apartment pining for her at all hours…

My ex also convinced me to finally get a 68000-based machine; an Amiga 500. They’d been out for about two years at that point, and I managed to score a used one with a monitor for $500 at a nearby computer store… This was the true beginning of my digital art life, and between the two of us that 500 got a serious workout.

By October things had started to level out; my ex was running games with everyone I knew and doing art of it all in her spare time, I was attending electronics and computer classes on the base, and things were looking like a smooth ride to my separation date.

Doug didn’t move out until October as he was on the off crew and was able to move to King’s Bay at his leisure.

My ex and I were putting a lot of miles on my car with trips up to Framingham to either gather stuff from her ex-husband’s parents place or just hang out with folks she knew up there. I recall that the trips tended to use the Transformers movie soundtrack and the new Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe album as driving music. One trip back to Connecticut the music was replaced by my ex’s cat, Merlin, yowling into the car’s vents to hear himself amplified.

One place we’d visit every time we were in Framingham was Fun N Games.

I remember buying a Sega Genesis in October of ’89 and playing a stupid amount of “Ghouls N Ghosts” on the thing with the crew over that Halloween.

The rest of the year was pretty much more of the same – classes, watch rotations, and other Navy Things, interspersed with roleplaying games, art, and road trips.

We left the apartment open for anyone who didn’t have anywhere else to go for the holidays. So, Christmas 1989 was spent at home with my ex and a half dozen random sailors. The big gifts were sets of Laser Tag gear I picked up at the local KB Toys.

1990

I turned 21 in February, and my birthday present for this year was a massive Laser Tag battle over in the Connecticut College Arboretum.

We all took our Laser Tag VERY seriously and the various teams would spend the week working out strategy to either take or hold “the base” depending on who’s turn it was.

My ex was incredibly proficient with dual Starlyte pistols while I was more into my Starlyte rifle that I’d fitted with custom glass optics, an IR detector for near misses, and an amplified microphone and earphone setup for hearing creepers in the underbrush.

My job was to provide overwatch for my ex as she madly charged the Base and slaughtered everyone…

I also carried a backup Starlyte pistol, which I still have.

In July, my four-year contract with the Navy, by my count, was supposed to be up on the first – but due to some fuzzy government math it turned out I had a bit more to go.

My ex and I were married in our living room by a justice of the peace on July 31^st, 1990.

After a series of unfortunate events, I stepped through the main gate of Groton subbase for the last time on the 18th of October, 1990, after having served my four-year contract (and then some).

Due to those unfortunate events, I lost my Lebaron along the way, so my ex acquired a Chevy S10 from a friend. Once we’d loaded everything that would fit into it, we headed for my parent’s place in Colorado…

In the span of about ten hours, I left behind what was essentially my entire life up to that point…

My grandmother had passed away in 1985, and she had left her house in Golden to my dad and my aunt. My dad had bought out my aunt’s half of the house, and as of October of 1985 we were living in Golden, on East Street, which means I was attending Golden High School for the 11th grade.

Golden H.S. was a run-down, confusing, campus-like collection of buildings that were probably built in the 1940’s – which was pure culture shock when you came from the ultra-modern 7-year-old Skyline H.S. in Longmont. It also had probably five times the student population…

And being as the new school year started in August of ’85 and I didn’t get registered until October because of the move, I didn’t get a choice on my classes and was just slotted into what had room.

So, I was in all the really stupid electives no one else wanted to take – and it sucked.

This also means I was in the Skyline Yearbook for 1985-1986 even though I was in Golden for the school year…

And then winter happened right after I arrived in Golden… So, I got to walk through the cold between buildings to get to classrooms that were cold to deal with teachers and students that were cold… I hated it there.

I wasn’t really happy with being uprooted and moving away from everything and everyone I knew in Longmont either. I had something of a social life and a lot of friends that I had to up and dump just because dad got a deal on a bigger house…

During the upheaval I got an Atari 800XL as something of a concession prize from my parents, which I updated with two Happy-mod 1050 disk-drives and an XM301 300 baud modem.

Being as I didn’t know anyone in Golden, I spent most of my time at home connected to the Colorado School of Mines terminal system (a local call) where I could get access to other online resources via CSNET without incurring the long-distance charges that pissed off my parents.

While the situation truly sucked, life wasn’t all bad, I guess… I got my driver’s license in February when I turned 17, and my parents split the cost of a car with me. Now, it wasn’t much of a car; a 1969 Toyota Corona that cost all of like $300 – but it was mine.

I honestly think the reason they went in on the car with me is they were tired of driving me across town to school. But, whatever – I was enjoying the freedom. It also let me land another job, such as it was.

I was working at King’s Table on Colfax part time, but any money is good money when you’re 17. That and west Colfax was the cruising capital of the Midwest on the 80’s… Sure, my car was laughable – but that didn’t matter much.

Golden High School did have one thing about it that I liked; they had an Advanced Placement Computer Science class that was held at the county’s mainframe center… After I’d aced the placement test, I got to ride a bus over there every other morning to work on professional grade hardware.

It also got me a login for the terminal system they were using for the data entry portion of the class, which I quickly discovered had levels of access…

To make a long story short, this was my first legit “system hack”. I gave myself supervisor privileges on the school’s S/36 by way of finding an overflow in the classroom application’s user menus that caused the session to drop to an unprotected command line…

This led to my getting a talking to from a system administrator… But it was more of a head-pat because he was impressed that I had figured out the S/36 on the fly with no manual or instruction. And this ended with me getting to spend time on the actual mainframe instead of doing data entry – as long as I promised to lay off the hacking.

I did a lot of tape loading, but I also got to write and run some of my own code on the IBM 3081 that lived in a pressurized airlocked elevated floor cleanroom. It was basically about as high-tech as it got, and I had access.

Back in the real world my disillusionment with Golden H.S. was complete, and I spent most of the 1986 school year hanging out in the library at school, working on my own research projects, and skipping all of the electives I’d been forced to take.

Yeah, I know it was dumb. But by skipping some really bad electives I probably advanced my knowledge of computer systems and programming by two years.

I did eventually get caught though and expelled for non-attendance in May of 86. The principle was very confused as I’d been at school every day, for the entire day, but in the library instead of classes… It was his suggestion that I take the GED as I was clearly a bright kid who was just bored with school.

Two weeks later, on May 21st, I’d taken and passed my GED.

And I was very happy to not have to go back to Golden H.S. ever again…

Things understandably went pretty pear-shaped with my parents after this, and accordingly I started thinking about enlisting. It would get me out of the house and away from things there, the Navy had some pretty high-tech stuff going on, and the recruiter said they would cover the cost of a 4-year degree – and they didn’t care if I had a GED; if I could pass the entry exam at a school, I could get a degree.

I was pretty sure I could pass any exam they threw at me…

In 1984 – 1985 I was still in Longmont and still living in the house at east 4th and Lashley.

I started High School in 1984, 10th grade, a sophomore and I was attending Skyline High School. Skyline was the super modern school that opened just five years prior, a half mile east of my old junior high.

Skyline was totally amazing; it housed the multimedia wonderland that was the Vance Brand Auditorium (VBA). It was at the VBA, in 1982, where my dad worked with Scripps Howard on the cable TV presentations that successfully brought cable TV into Longmont. While this was going on I was left to run around and pester people, so I got to lay hands on some lights and some of the stuff in the sound and projection booth – under the guidance of some real studio pros.

This kindled a life-long appreciation for the theater arts, but before this cable thing all we had in Longmont was a couple of local TV stations and microwave HBO and Showtime.

I guess it was about 1980 or so when my dad built a pirate microwave downconverter out of a round metal snow sled, three threaded rods, a coffee can, and some ingenuity – and we had HBO and Showtime at the house for a couple of years prior to cable… You know, because science.

Anyway, I was pretty enthused about taking “Theater Arts” in my 10th grade year with such a high-tech setup as the VBA being attached to the school. But the enthusiasm was short lived; the class was pretty much nothing but a lot of after-school prop work… I get that one has to work their way up, but it was incredibly frustrating to be doing nothing but painting 2x4s black for two hours after school every other day. And I was looking at having to do this for a year before I could even touch a light.

Needless to say, I didn’t sign back up for Theater Arts for the next semester.

Skyline also had a computer class – if you could call it that…

Computer Operation and Data Entry was another elective, and it was integrated into the math department. And even though the school had owned a half-dozen Apple IIe machines for a couple of years at this point, the class is really self-study because no one in administration had a clue what to do with the systems.

The computer lab itself was right off of the library, on the second floor, so it was easy to get books and take them to the desk for reference.

Most of the self-study course work used Apple Logo, which bored me to death, but I could get the lesson done in 5-10 minutes, do the typing drills really quick, and then move on to my own projects… The machines at the school also had “Koala Pads” which, while primitive, kinda got me into the tablet thing decades before tablets were a thing…

Outside of school I’d been working in 6502 assembly for a year or so, using the VicMon cartridge on my VIC-20 (I blew past BASIC in a couple of months because BASIC eats up too much of the limited VIC-20 memory). The Apple machines also used a 6502, so most of my time on the school’s Apple IIe’s was either learning stuff I was interested in (D/A converters were my thing in 10th grade, I wanted to build a robotic arm), working on my own programs, or reverse-engineering games to see how they work.

My first legit ‘software hack’ was in 1985, on those machines at Skyline… Using a hex editor, I removed the copy protection from a friend’s copy of “Karateka” so that I could play it too.

A couple of times up there in the computer lab I got so focused on whatever it was I was working on that I missed my next class, which was Graphic Design. Fortunately, it was another elective, and I wasn’t too worried about it.

This was the beginning of the end of school for me. I started to evaluate electives by how much time they took away from whatever hardware or software project I was working on…

For my machines at home, I’d been trying to talk my parents into springing for a Commodore 64 now that they’d come down in price – mostly to get my hands on the 6510 and its extra I/O lines… But then I saw some news about Atari’s new “XL” series, and they looked pretty sweet.

And then there was Apple’s ad for the “Macintosh”, which was amazing, and the whole ‘mouse’ and ‘graphical user interface’ thing looked absolutely killer… There’s no way I could get one though as they were really, really expensive; $2500 ($6700 in 2022).

I really wanted a 68000-based machine though… Someday!

Here are some of the current events from my 10th grade yearbook, and a glance back in time:

Music-wise New Wave was all the rage on the radio and MTV. I was rockin’ out to groups like Def Leppard and Van Halen, but was also into groups like U2, Men at Work, Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Flock of Seagulls, and Thomas Dolby. The era was quickly being defined though by one hit wonders like Spandau Ballet’s “True”, Naked Eyes’ “Promises, promises”, The Tubes’ “She’s a Beauty”, Madness’ “Our House”, Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy”, Taco’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz”, After the Fire’s “Der Kommissar”, and Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Come On Eileen”.

Musically 84/85 was pretty amazing, with lots of new sounds and musical textures powered by lots of grandiose synthesizers, digital drums, and intricate guitar work.

All in all it was a really good couple of years…

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.