SWISSDIGITIZATION.CH

One night, sometime during the eighties - I was maybe ten years old - my dad came home with a computer that he had salvaged from his company. It was the only computer his civil engineering company of twenty employees owned. It was an HP, with a huge mechanical keyboard directly built into the unit, a monochrome monitor, a floppy disk reader and some weird cartridges. It took us a while to set it up. When switching it on, it greeted us with a >. Nothing but a > and a blinking cursor. We didn't know what to do with it, me least of all. The only computer I had come into touch with before was a neighborhood friend's Atari ST on which we used to play Winter Games. But the Atari ST had a mouse, and you double clicked things, and it made music and displayed colorful games! What we had was green, didn't do anything I could understand But it was what we had, and I knew there wasn't going to be anything better for a long time.

The computer also came with manuals: Two thick spiral-bound tomes filled with technical language. Luckily they were written in German, so I got to work. I tried to learn a lot about computers, but I couldn't really understand what I could do with this machine. So it basically just sat there for months without me able to tickle anything out of it until a coworker of my dad's explained how I could load programs from 5 1/4 floppy disks by typing some cryptic commands. We had the floppy disks all along, but never found out how to use them. They held exciting things like a text editor (yay!) or a calculator (more yay!) and some programs to do engineering calculations. But it did teach me one thing: How to get started. Typing strange words into computers apparently made them do things!

It turned out that the computer could only understand BASIC and that it wouldn't do anything for me if I didn't tell it to do that first. Lucky for me, they already understood in the 80s that games are a really good motivational tool to learn programming and had included the full source code for a very simple version of Space Invaders. I don't know how many times it took me to get it right, but I eventually managed to copy the code into the machine and then "beeep" the spaceship and the aliens appeared on the screen: Space Invaders! Programmed in BASIC on a monochrome HERCULES monitor! I never understood the program, but I did understand how to give myself more lives!

After this, I typed this program countless times because I didn't know how to store it to a floppy disk. That is, until about two years later, I got an NES and understood that I loved playing games, but just didn't have the wonderbrain to write BASIC code to make games at eleven years of age. Only now, when doing some research about this machine, did I find out that the computer was (probably) an HP-86. But I do know that this mysterious machine is always at the back of my head when I think about how computers really work.