A Life Wasted

Ohio 1981-1982

Time in Ohio's Marion prison wasn't too bad. I managed to get a good job working as the clerk for the prison's pre-release counselor. Most important to my future the job gave me access to my first personal computer, a Radio Shack TRS-80. There wasn't any software for the TRS-80, but it was loaded with the Basic operating system. It was the first computer I'd ever seen and I was fascinated by it. At the time the home computer industry was in its infancy, but being locked up in Georgia where there were no TV's, newspapers, or magazines, I was ignorant to the developing computer industry. The TRS-80 changed everything I believed about myself. I'd went through most of my life thinking I was stupid. I believed I'd failed second and seventh grades because I wasn't capable of learning. Yes they'd made a big deal about my IQ and about my off-the-charts score in Abstract Reasoning, but none of that translated into any thing I could use in life. High test scores were meaningless. A ninth grader with a car was not a bight kid. A ninth grader with a car was a big oaf with a learning disability. I was that ninth grader and I was stupid. Within a few days of playing with the Radio Shack computer I began to appreciate the utility of all that IQ, and especially the usefulness of a powerful abstract reasoning. The computer convinced me that I wasn't stupid at all. I just hadn't been exposed to the right tools. I knew immediately the computer would be my tool. I knew that with a computer I could unleash all that I was meant to be.

We lacked software to make it do anything other than play games, but one of the games was written in BASIC. BASIC is a non-compiled language, which, among other things means that if you have the game, you also have the source code. So I could see the game software's code. The actual program that made it work. We didn't have a manual on how to program in BASIC, or anything else. Inmates weren't suppose to learn to program computers. The Ohio Department of Corrections had a deep rooted belief that an inmate learning to program would be a bad thing. Like we'd be able to digitally rob a bank or launch nuclear missiles, or something else. Ironical, prison officials have the same mentality in 2016. Prisoners still aren't allowed to program computers or to learn to program computers. We're not even allowed books on programming.

Back to 1981: So I had access to a computer with games written in BASIC, but no instruction manuals. Remember this was years before the internet, even before cell phones. This was the first computer I'd ever touched and it was far from the machines you use today. This computer didn't have a hard drive, or even a floppy disk. To load or save a program you had to use a cassette tape. On the computer you typed in the command: RUN BLACKJACK. The screen would then respond with: Press Play on tape player. Then you'd press play on a normal cassette tape player and the small game program would take fifteen minutes to load. My point being this was a very early personal computer without a great deal of power. But it did have BASIC.

I began studying the source code for the game. At first it looked like Sanskrit to me. Some of the programming terms were obvious, like GOTO, STOP, RUN, IF THEN, but others were not so obvious. BASIC is run in sequential blocks, so the first line would be numbered 10, the second 20, and so on. It was easy to understand code like: "IF 250 = 'Y', THEN GOTO 855, ELSE GOTO 1250. Meaning, if line number 250, which was a keyboard input, equaled the letter Y, then skip everything else and go to line number 855, but if the input is anything else, then go to line number 1250. Some of it was simple and easy to understand, other code was not so simple. After a few days of studying the game's code I began to figure out what I was looking at. In a few weeks I wrote my own simple program from scratch. A month later I wrote a program that operated as an address book. After six months I wrote my first application program. It was a program designed to aid a collection agency in their efforts. (A convict there had done this on the street, so I used his business model to design the software.) When this guy said, "You could sell that to every collection agency in the country," a light went on in my head. Computers might actually be good for something besides games. Of course I wasn't the only one to figure this out. A fellow named Bill Gates and another named Stephen Jobs were both a few steps ahead of me. Still, I thought it was a great idea.