I always wanted to get to be over 30 so I could gain enough respect to do advanced things that were always discouraged for youngsters back home where most people have always been over 65.
Well, in 1982 when the IBM PC was not very popular yet (under 50,000 sold) and non-businesses were still using their Commodores and Ataris, I decided to improve my programming abilities and build a small game for my Atari 400.
Earlier with arcade games I never thought Pac-Man was very interesting, but when Centipede appeared I liked it because of its trackball interface.
I guess I'm just what they would nowadays call a natural UI/UX guy.
When the 400 came out it was attractive since it was not just a game console like the earlier 2600, but a full computer that also played some of the same games from its own series of cartridges which were more advanced than the 2600 anyway. BASIC programming was also available in cartridge form.
I wanted my own home computer mainly to continue the machine-learning I had pioneered a year earlier during the Houston oil boom where I had procured expensive Hewlett-Packard benchtop oil & gas analyzers at my employer, but was having more breakthroughs developing "software" than I was on the hardware.
It was a petroleum engineering laboratory startup where I was operating the instruments in the lab during the day, then writing code at night by hand on paper, to be typed into the terminals at work once the module was complete.
After the crude oil & gas (exploration & production) boom went bust, I was luckily able to move to a traditional employer, who was in the refined products (fuel & petrochemicals) measurement & testing field.
This was a 100-year-old service corporation, not a research place.
Anyway, even Apples and the new IBM PC's were not powerful enough for my former pursuit, but after they came out with a Centipede cartridge for the 400, I decided to get one, plus since I was employed I figured I could afford a trackball in addition to the joysticks that came with the Atari.
To code my first game I did not expect to be able to achieve very fast action, which was dependent on machine language, since I was just using Atari BASIC.
So I settled on "MasterMind" which I selected for its pure logic base and its particular two-user operation where only one participant at a time is the actual player, and the "opponent" merely qualifies the player's progress among successive determinations against a hidden pattern.
To emulate the "opponent", the computer would select the hidden pattern at random and provide feedback to the player, reducing it to a one-player puzzle.
All I had was the 400, the BASIC & Centipede carts, the trackball & joysticks, plus a fairly good Atari reference book. I had to leave the 400 powered on all the time since I had no data storage, but eventually got the Atari cassette after it became affordable.
Trying to make the most of the hardware I had, I ended up with an intuitive point & click, drag & drop, player scenario using the trackball in a way that years later would be very common once the computer mouse appeared for Apples & PC's, and especially after Windows came out and became
popular because of pointing & clicking.
Meanwhile, like most employers, mine was more interested in status quo rather than maximum utilization of resources, but I became informed that they were going to embrace computers first in the tank calibration department. I was in chemical analysis but I knew the ASTM calibration manual fairly well and thought this was an excellent choice, there were geometric calculations based on physical properties & measurements, with a resulting report tabulated into an 11x17 inch chart having entries in fine print for each depth of fluid that was to be inventoried in that tank each time for the following decade. It was text output, looking like a spreadsheet, but these were traditionally reduced from a
blueprint master which the cells had been typed in with a manual (non-electric) typewriter having a special wide-carriage.
I was naturally disappointed when I found out the project had already been underway since before I was hired, an established Northern consulting group was doing the work, they were being paid over $100,000 and already delayed well beyond the target date.
You can only imagine my feelings after the project was finally delivered and I found out from the calibration guys how they thought it was quite a time-saver.
They loved the way it printed the final charts in fine print using the new-fangled 17inch wide PC printers without having to go through the typewriting/blueprinting process.
But the raw data entry, calculations, output, and manual typing of final data into each cell was still done by hand.
The consultant had merely provided a replacement for half of what the typewriter was doing, the mechanical printing function of the typewriter, but not even the hand keying :-\
there's more but that's enough for now . . .