Confessions of a Middle Aged Techie

Or What I Learned About Technology from the Commodore 64

Even though I am just barely on the edge of my fourth decade on this earth and do not check off any of the “25 Surefire Signs You’ve Finally Hit Middle Age” boxes (okay maybe a couple), I got my tech start back in the early 1980s. In tech-years that puts me squarely at middle age, or more accurately 100111.

My father was an engineer and a technophile. I still remember the day he showed up with the grayish-tannish Commodore 64 and proudly proclaimed that this was the wave of the future. Once the computer was set-up, the first thing he showed my brothers and I was how to program it using BASIC to guess your number. It was amazing! How did it know what number we were thinking of? What evil wizardry was afoot? Looking back, the Commodore was even more astounding considering how much it did with just 64 KB RAM and 20 KB ROM, which is less processing power than your smart toaster. We were all hooked from day one — fast forward 35 years and you might (not) be surprised that my brothers and I all are programmers.