Hello world!

by

Here is where the blog begins.

Photo of a TRS-80 Computer
This is what $1000 of computer equipment looked like in 1978 or so. The high resolution monitor displayed 64 characters across and 16 lines of text and the graphics resolution was 128×48 pixels (and black or white only, not even shades of grey). The computer had 16K (yes K!) of memory and stored programs on a cassette recorder. For comparison, this photo of a TRS-80 is 328 × 282 full color pixels and the graphic itself is 33K. However, making things work on the TRS-80 was a thrill and using Windows Vista makes me bang my head against the wall with the constant crashing.

There was a time on my TRS-80 when something like this was very exciting:

>10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!"
>RUN
HELLO WORLD!
>READY
>_

I would stay up all night working on making tanks or spaceships move around the screen. Come up with some code, type RUN, and see how it works.

Now you can get that same kind of immediate feedback when you develop a website and get something cool to work. The difference is that the whole world can see it.

And I still stay up all night working on stuff on the computer. (Remember that when you see typos on the site.)