This is the twelfth entry in the O’Reilly Radar series about how alpha geeks got into computers. Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, a forceful speaker in his role as European Affairs Coordinator for the EFF (donate!), and at least partially responsible for the world’s first open source cola formula.
Cory Doctorow’s Story
I used to go the Ontario Institute For Studies in Education where my
father was getting his teacher’s certificate. I was five or six. He’d
sit me down at a terminal connected to the school’s PDP and set me to
playing with Eliza or tinkering in BASIC. I loved typing dirty words
into Eliza and having her echo them back.
At home I didn’t have a computer, but I did have a CARDIAC cardboard
computer simulator from Bell Labs that I *loved* to pieces
(literally). I used to make elaborate paper control-panels for
mainframes in my bedroom out of construction paper and cover my
little desk with them.
By the end of that year, we had an acoustic coupler and a teletype
terminal and a roll of brown paper like the paper towels in the
bathrooms at my elementary school. I filled many miles of brown paper
writing BASIC programs and playing Eliza and Hangman (and looking at
the source for each, which was mystifying to my little brain).
In 1979 my dad was head of comp sci at a local high school and Apple
gave all the CS teachers in town an Apple ][+ to take home for the
summer. Glass terminal! No paper! Mighty was my w00t! I didn’t go
outside that summer. Instead, I wrote long, long BASIC programs that
ran to thousands of lines. They would print out ASCII art figures and
other things. I hand-keyed programs from Byte Magazine and lots of
other sources.
It only got cooler when we got the 80-column card, the Hayes modem
and the 64k expansion — though they couldn’t all be plugged in at
once, so when I wanted to dial up a BBS, I’d unplug the 80-column
card and switch to all uppercase. I read a novel a day then, killing
time while the machine redialed the perpetually busy pool of BBSes in
town.
We got a //e and a //c, and then a Mac 128. I had a brief flirtation
with the Amiga, but it was a boat anchor and I went back to hacking
Hypertalk, which had me hooked through the bag. I did everything in
Hypertalk. I made a stack that cracked the security on other stacks.
I made a stack that tracked Bush I’s lies and inconsistencies in his
public statements. I wrote a stack to track response times from
fiction markets. My parents got stacks for birthdays and Xmas. In
univerisity, I did an artificial life sim in Hypertalk called Get
ALife! and then I dropped out to program in Hypertalk for Voyager in
NYC.
Then the CD market collapsed and I ended up developing a commercial
gopher site (!), but work was interuppted halfway through when I
discoverd NCSA Mosaic and we downed tools to build Web sites.