I learned how to write programs in Fortran in 1969 when I was in high school, north of Seattle. They were sent on punch cards to the school district's IBM 1401 computer, and a huge stack of paper would be returned if there was an error, but if it worked, you might get one or two pages.

A year later the university I was at gave me time on their IBM 360. I learned their home-grown WPL language. I didn't use computers for years after that until 1978. By then, I was teaching primary school in Port Pirie, South Australia, a country town located about 250 km north of Adelaide.

I discovered that a HP 9830 desktop computer that floated between the three high schools there. I taught myself how to program it and I wrote two pieces that I'd been wanting to write for a long time: a program based on Jay Forrester's published World Dynamics code that projected the future of the Earth in terms of resource usage, population growth, pollution, etc, and another program that simulated the formation of planets using info from an article by Stephen Dole that had appeared in the Icarus astronomy journal.

I wanted to see what the affects of space colonization might have on the future, and I wanted to calculate reasonable probabilities of finding different types of planets around different types of stars by modifying Dole's program. Not riveting stuff for most but I was able to present a revised version of the latter program at a large meeting of the South Australian Astronomical Society in 1990.

In 1979 I bought a Tandy Model 1, taught myself its Basic and started writing original programs. It had a whopping 4k of memory which I quickly upgraded to 16k. I wrote a pile of little programs including several of my own text-based adventure games, which I spread around Pirie and Adelaide via contacts.

I brought this machine to school and had to write programs so my students could use it, there just wasn't any good learning software about then. I researched Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI) and made sure my programs were based on those learning principals.

Early in '82 the school bought two Tandy Color Computers. I wrote a few dozen programs for this system for the entire school to use. The graphics were all hard-coded and I used stacks of graph paper designing images. For one project, the children in my year 5 class designed a computer game from scratch, including drawing the graphics, and it was published in "Australian Rainbow" magazine. Later, I submitted and sold three of the classroom programs to Tandy Australia. Their rep flew all the way from Sydney to Pirie for a week to see me. They bought 3 of my programs -- Maths Invaders, Spelling and Cordial Stall, and for awhile in 1983 they were the highest selling pieces of software in Tandy's catalogue. I also wrote a monthly column for the magazine, too. Another program I wrote for the school managed its library. Little did I know what seed that planted!

This brings us up to early 1983. I branched out and bought a VIC-20, which to me was unimpressive and difficult to program, so I didn't do much with it.