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From: meb4074@cec1.wustl.edu (Mark Edward Bradley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: The good old days...(Why we all got into it)
Summary: Just a little maudlin
Message-ID: <1990Feb6.120746.22035@cec1.wustl.edu>
Date: 6 Feb 90 12:07:46 GMT
References: <1361@crash.cts.com> <1990Feb4.102221.23801@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <1500@husc6.harvard.edu>
Sender: news@cec2 (USENET News System)
Reply-To: meb4074@cec2.UUCP (Mark Edward Bradley)
Organization: Washington University, St. Louis, MO
Lines: 36

In article <1500@husc6.harvard.edu> ehsu@husc7.UUCP (Eric Hsu) writes:
>but let's not get so uppity. Some twenty-year-olds (me !) like games too.
>In fact a fair number of CS majors (I'm not one) that I know grew up on IIs.
>They first played games on the Apple II and then began hacking out programs 
>on the II, then emerging into full CS-dom in college. I wonder if the same 
>sort of cycle is happening on the Amiga machines? I dunno. 
>	Now that I've digressed, I'm remembering a little of the fun and 
>comraderie of me and my friends programming little Applesoft games, trying
>to top each other. To me, that's what personal computing's all about. I kind
>of miss that now. Maybe it's because I'm at college now, but I don't see much
>of that any more. Does it still happen? That is, are there any non-serious 
>programmers out there?
>
>						Nostalgically,
>
>						Eric Hsu
>						ehsu@husc4.UUCP
>						ehsu@husc4.Bitnet
>Eric Hsu                           ehsu@husc4.Bitnet, ehsu@husc4.UUCP

I'm a twenty-year-old that followed exactly that path into the world of
computers (God, I sound like a Nintendo commercial) My first computer was a
][+ when I was in 7th grade. Before a year had passed, I had filled up about
a hundred disks with Applesoft programs, most of them games. When my games got
too complex for Applesoft (which wasn't too high a degree of complexity), I
learned 6502 assembly. Ah, good old 16 bit addressing and 1 MHz speed!! So here
I am in college, a CS major, with my ][ and my program collection in my room.
It doesn't get much use now, my girlfriend will play Shanghai on it or I will
use this Applesoft compiler I found recently to speed up some of my more
cumbersome old games and laugh at the results. But I couldn't bear to part with
it, (snif) because sometimes I'll pull out Castle Wolfenstein or Ultima and
relive those days of yore....

-- 
Mark Bradley              "Don't cry for lost souls -- you might drown."
meb4074@cec2.wustl.edu