alt Hacker NewsI'll never forget the TI-99/4A. I was 8 years old, in second grade in Southern California. We had a "computer lab" which was a mobile building with 13 or 15 TI-99/4A's, and about half of them had color TV's and the rest, B+W. Nobody really knew anything, but we did have books to copy BASIC programs out of.
One kid entered a program that flashed colors and patterns on the color TV. Our teacher was epileptic, and this sent her into a seizure. Myself and another kid ran to get the 5th grade teacher who'd been a doctor at some point (don't ask, I dont know, I was 8) and he came running and attended to her. She was fine.
I'd always been interested in how things work, taking things apart, playing with my 30-in-1 electronics lab from Radio Shack. But this new computer thing... this was something. That experience flipped a bit in my 8 year old brain. All because of a TI-99/4A.
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My god, your classmate hacked the teacher!
I love this story, but not because the teacher had epilepsy! The flashing colors, and ability to draw from the center of the screen to the outer bounds, and showing it happen in real time (since the graphics weren't so fast then) was a huge factor in me getting involved in programming. I started off with Atari BASIC, and my first program of my own was a strobe light, where I could control the speed and generate a random color to display on each "strobe".
Once I saw how fun that was to actually run and show friends (which I think was the big draw for me in the 80's), I created an English to Pig Latin translator, which was more based on an official example, but I remember putting more work into it, including a trigger for certain "bad words" my friends would definitely enter, and giving them a surprise flash and warning. Not sophisticated in any way, just a bunch of IF statements for specific words, then a fall through for anything not matching to be translated.
I used to have a book on experiments using a 6-volt battery, and I got my son one of those 30-in-1 kits, and we had a lot of fun with it. I was more easily able to move from the electronic kit to software with him, having had interest in both, and now he's picked up the software itch.