By Fred D’Ignazio — originally published in Volume 1 – Issue 1 – June, 1983
You can use this corner of COMPUTE!’s Gazette as a launch pad to send you blasting away each month on a new computer adventure with your VIC-20 or your Commodore 64 computer.
One month I’ll show you how to set up a secret phone line between your computer and your friends. We’ll see how you can invent a secret language on your computer that only your friend can decode. You can send each other messages and play games, all in your secret language.
Another month I’ll show you how to set up video games on your computer. Then I’ll show you how to use the video games to help you with your homework.
Let’s spend at least a couple of months using our computers to create adventure games and dangerous missions. I’ll show you how to invent games where you get to be the hero and fight evil creatures and discover fantastic treasures.
We should also spend some time trying to answer some popular questions kids have about computers. For example:
Should I learn to program?
Which language is best – BASIC, Logo, or PILOT?
What kind of computer career should I aim for?
Are video games good for you or bad?
How can I lobby for more computers in my school?
Why are my parents scared of computers?
How can my computer help me study?
Who’s better at computers – girls or boys?
Also, in a section entitled “Can You Imagine?” I’ll tell you about some of the latest developments in computers and some of the exciting things you can expect in the future.
Who’s Out There?
And I’d like to get to know you. Write and tell me who you are and why computers turn you on. I want to hear from you. It may take me awhile, but I’ll always write back.
If you have any good programs, tricks, or ideas, write and share them with me. I’ll print the best ones in this column each month under the heading: “Kids Know Best.”
Also, if I say something that makes you mad, write me and tell me why. You can reach me by writing:
Fred D’Ignazio
c/o COMPUTE!’s Gazette for Commodore
P.O. Box 5406
Greensboro, NC 27403
This column is for everyone – big kids, little kids, fat kids, skinny kids, and kids with green polka dots on their feet. I want it to be the column you turn to every month as soon as you get your new issue of the Gazette. You can help me do this by writing and telling me what you most want to see.
Who Am I?
Who am I?
I’m a computer nut. I love computers – even more than pizza, steak sandwiches, or spaghetti.
Once, several years ago, my wife bopped me on the head with a pillow because she was jealous of my computer. Actually it wasn’t a computer, it was a computer terminal that talked on a telephone with a big computer thousands of miles away. The terminal was neat because it fit into a briefcase. I used to stay up all night programming the computer on the kitchen table. Lots of nights I got so carried away, I forgot to go to bed.
And computer fantasies? Wow! I used to dream of computers even before I ever met one. But now, at long last, my dreams have come true. I have a house full of computers – computers in the bedroom, in the dining room, in my study, and in the play room. This morning I took a computer with me into the bathroom. Yesterday I was really proud because I got six computers running programs, all at the same time. One was playing music, two were talking, one was spitting out words, one was drawing crazy turtle pictures all over the TV screen, and one was controlling a robot.
A Robot Pterodactyl
I have written 15 books about computers and robots, including Katie and the Computer, Working Robots, the Star Wars Question and Answer Book About Computers, and a new solve-it-yourself mystery series. The first book in the series is Chip Mitchell: The Case of the Stolen Computer Brains. It just came out this spring.
I really envy the hero of the series, Chip Mitchell. Chip has even more computers than I have. And he has a talking pet robot named Sherwin, 456 snakes, monkeys, lizards, wallaroos, gerbils, and frogs, all living in his bedroom. Of course Chip doesn’t have something I have: a pterodactyl robot that sleeps under my desk and nips my knees while I’m writing.
We Were Kids Together
Computers and I go way back. I was born on January 6, 1949, at Bryn Mawr Hospital, just outside Philadelphia. As I was lying in the nursery, crying, slobbering, and gooing along with a dozen other babies, I didn’t realize there was another baby just up the road that was already beginning to make history. That baby didn’t slobber or cry. With its 20,000 glowing vacuum tubes the size of pickles, it was hot stuff. Who was the baby? It was ENIAC, the world’s first modern computer.
As the years went by, computers and I grew up. We were neighbors, but we still hadn’t met. I grew bigger, like a normal kid. But while I was growing big, computers grew enormous. By 1959, when I was ten years old, some computers were bigger than a brontosaurus. One computer, the Whirlwind I, in Massachusetts, occupied a two-story building the size of a city block.
During the 1960s I still hadn’t heard about computers. But I was getting ready for them. I had a bedroom in the attic of an old stone house. Off the corner of the bedroom was my “Monster’s Den.” It was really a giant closet, but I called it my Monster’s Den because that’s where I kept all the creatures I had invented – clay aliens, plastic dinosaurs, and robots made out of old go-cart motors, motorcycle batteries, and dryer hoses.
I read comic books, saw monster movies, and stayed up late for the scary movies that came on TV after midnight.
At night I dreamt about monsters, and about building a machine someday that would obey my orders – just like Dr. Frankenstein’s creature. Except not like Dr. Frankenstein’s exactly, since his creature didn’t listen too well.
Little did I know that I was dreaming about computers. And while I was dreaming, computers were undergoing an almost magical change. They were like Alice in Wonderland. At first, they had grown really big. Then, one day, after eating a piece of cake, they grew very, very small.
What happened?
In California, an engineer named Ted Hoff did the impossible. He squeezed hundreds of computer circuits onto a tiny square of silicon the size of a baby’s big toenail. Ted had invented the world’s first chip “brain.” He had started the personal computer revolution.
This was about the time I first bumped into a computer. I met the computer at college. I taught it to tell me how many Chinese were visiting Latin America. At the time, I thought this was an important subject. The computer added up the number of Chinese visitors and helped me make lots of pretty graphs to impress my professors.
Dreams To Magic Words
I was hooked. When I programmed the computer, I felt like a lion tamer in a circus. With just a few commands, typed into a typewriter, I was able to control a machine that was bigger than my college dorm, and faster than greased lightning.
I especially liked computers because I could control them with words instead of with screwdrivers, wrenches, pulleys, and gears. It made me feel like a magician. If I said the magic word, the computer would turn cartwheels. Of course, sometimes I said the wrong magic word, and the computer stood on its head or rolled over and played dead.
In the 1970s, I went to work for a company programming computers full-time. I worked on a computer in the basement of the Pentagon, in Washington, D.C. Just to get into the computer room each day I had to wear five security badges hanging from my neck like dog tags. My job was so top secret I never even got to see the real data for my programs. All I knew was that my programs had something to do with sending soldiers’ socks and underwear all over the world.
The basement of the Pentagon was a gloomy place. Everyone frowned and carried rifles. Pipes hung from the ceilings. After only a couple of weeks there, I devised a plan to escape. One day, I took my briefcase computer terminal, slipped out the back door, and started visiting elementary schools around Washington.
When I arrived in a classroom, I plugged the terminal into a telephone, and the kids and I called up my company’s big computer in Chicago. We bought Bob Albrecht’s book, What Do You Do After You Hit Return?, and we used it to teach us how to program in BASIC.
It was a great thrill. Here we were in a school classroom playing with a company’s giant computer. I was supposed to be working. The kids were supposed to be working. Instead we were playing games like Mugwump, Hurkle, and Hunt The Wumpus. It was a nice break from programming socks and underwear.
My company didn’t let me stay in the classrooms too long. They decided to use the top-secret military programming skills I had developed at the Pentagon and put me to work programming Bicentennial military bases. I wrote a program that automatically produced a letter to Congressmen congratulating them on having a new Bicentennial military base in their district. When I finally got the program debugged, it was one of my proudest moments in top-secret military programming.
A Bonk On The Nose
Soon after this success, my wife and I moved to North Carolina. We had a baby daughter named Catie. Shortly after Catie was born, I had her sitting at the computer in my study, banging happily on the keys. We used to spend hours in this creative form of free play. One night, however, all of a sudden, Catie lost her balance, fell forward, and bonked her nose on the picture screen.
Oh, how she howled!
My wife came running and yelled at me for almost letting Catie fall into the computer. This was such a good idea for a book that I immediately sat down to write it. Two years and 99 rejection letters later, the book was published. It was called Katie and the Computer. It was about a little girl named Katie who fell inside her family’s computer and found a magic land known as Cybernia. Katie’s adventures inside the computer included riding down a mountain on a bobsled, meeting a ferocious robot spider, parachuting out of an airplane, and getting fired out of a pirate’s cannon in the midst of a big glob of goopy green paint.