Disk 1 · c. 1991 · age 7
Type-In
Seven years old, a library book and a computer. I didn't understand all of it. I typed it anyway.
The computer was an Amiga 500, on a desk in the corner of my bedroom: computer, keyboard and disk drive in one beige wedge, with the monitor sat on the desk behind it. BASIC didn't come built in. It lived on the Extras disk, which is not where anyone would think to look.
The book came from the library. It was COMPUTE!'s First Book of Amiga, or the Second, or COMPUTE!'s Kids and the Amiga, and I've never been sure which. It was open at a game called BRICKS, and the listing went on for forty-four lines.
The top of the page was a program, more or less. The bottom was numbers: DATA lines, rows and rows of them, holding the colours, the ball, the wall and the tune. Nobody could follow them and everybody had to copy them exactly, because one wrong digit breaks the lot.
I typed it in a line at a time, with the lamp on the book and a finger on the page, while everyone else was out on their bikes. Then I typed RUN.
It didn't run. My mum had to fix all the DATA lines.
She was a librarian, so checking things against a book was more or less her job. She sat down in my chair and went through every number on the screen against every number in the book, and fixed the ones I'd got wrong: a letter O where the book wanted a nought, two digits the wrong way round. Then she typed RUN, and it worked.
A bat, a ball and a wall, all made out of those numbers. I played it until tea. Then I played it after tea.
