Tales from the Memory Banks

How I got my computer science degree from the school of hard knocks

I was fifteen and, with all modesty, something of a coding prodigy. I’d learned to program on a Texas Instrument calculator at eleven, graduated to a Radio Shack Color Computer and sold my first program at age fourteen.

Here it was in all it’s 256 x 192 pixel glory.

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Impressive, is it not? Well perhaps not. To explain, I’d sold it to a “magazine” that came out as a monthly cassette of programs, with the first program being a fun title animation. There was, for example, a title animation that showed Conway’s Game of Life. The really impressive part was that I found a Radio Shack Color Computer emulator AND the archives of the Chromasette “magazine” releases and was able to load my old program some forty years after I had written it. Few things have shocked me more in my adult life to see my old code staring back at me.

This is what happens when you’re reasonably bright, have two parents who were programmers (from the very earliest days of computers, before a Computer Science Degree even existed), and when you have a lot of reasons to seek out escapism.

Computers made sense to me in a way that few things did. There were rules, once you learned them you had control over a tiny and orderly universe.

I liked to draw as well, so when I first saw the Macintosh I was hooked and managed to get one.

Chromasette had folded after purchasing two more of my programs (the first in BASIC, the next two written in assembly language), so I responded to an ad in the newspaper by a guy who was looking for young programmers like me. He seemed old but was probably in his thirties, wore suits and had slicked back hair. Let’s call him Jeff. As I was to discover, his modus operandi was to land contracts for programming work, have smart teenagers like do the work, and take a huge cut.

One of my first contracts with him was to implement a shell sort algorithm in 6502 assembly. That sort of thing. I might have gotten $25 for that project.

But through Jeff I landed a contract to port an educational software from DOS to the Macintosh for a company called Compu-Teach, and I enjoyed that. Because the DOS graphics were low res and I had some artistic talent, I redrew all the graphics. Later I would find out that my cut of a project like that was $350, where he had been paid $2000. And I was programming on my own hardware. But I was to find that out later.

Jeff was a sleaze ball in other ways. I remember when his teenage daughter and her friend stopped by the office and after they left he expressed his lust for her friend with a wolfish grin.

By far the biggest project he hooked me up with was a port of Ultima II to the Macintosh. I’m not sure how much time I spent doing this. Maybe a year? I did some smaller projects on the side. It was a great challenge, and I was full of hubris.

I didn’t have a PC, but there was one at his office so I played it there. It seemed fun. Very much inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, a game I had played when I was younger before I discovered computers. So that was a big draw.

Now, I didn’t have a PC at home. I’d never played Ultima 2 before. When I agreed to do the port, I didn’t realize all the modules within in, the casino games you could play in town and so on. I’d severely underestimated the complexity of this game.

It didn’t help that I had no source code. I believe Richard Garriott, the author had provided it but on a 5.25" disc which my Mac could not read. In retrospect, this port was simply doomed to failure without the source code.

You would think that Jeff would have helped me out with something so basic as transfering data from one format to the other, but he was not interested in helping me. So really my only knowledge of the game came from playing it. I was 58 years old when I learned that there was a whole space combat module!

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After working through the summer and still feeling like I had just scratched the surface of this game, I told Jeff that I was thinking of walking away. We had a conversation in Jeff’s new red Thunderbird convertible in which he tried to convince me to keep going. I kept thinking that my success would mean a lot more to him than it would to me.

It hurt to give up. I’d done so much work on it. I’d hand drawn so many monsters, had put so much heart and soul into it. But it didn’t make sense for me to finish it. Especially not after Compu-Teach, the company that I’d done a port for previously, contacted me directly.

Jeff told me that “Wakeen” from Compu-Teach wanted to meet me. He had written down “Wakeen” on a piece of paper along with a phone number. I called the number and we arranged to meet at my house.

I assumed I was meeting an Asian man, but no, I instead met Joaquin. I showed him Jeff’s note with “Wakeen” written on it and we laughed. And he was equally surprised to meet me, a fifteen year old boy. He asked how much I’d been paid for the port. I told him $350. He told me that they’d paid Jeff $2000, and he proposed I work for them directly.

This meeting marked the beginning of my career as a computer programmer. I went on to port numerous title for them and was actually paid for my efforts.

For that, I suppose I have to give Jeff some thanks. The ridiculous sleazeball that he was.