The Strange Pleasures of Retyping Computer Code, Over and Over and Over Again

Back in the 1980s I did it all the time — and it was weirdly fun

Code for Conway’s “Game of Life”, from the 1979 book “BASIC Computer Games”

I first dove headfirst into computer programming during the summer of 1981, when my father’s friend lent me his VIC-20.

He’d bought the machine figuring that, hey, computers are the wave of the future! Except as he discovered, a VIC-20 in 1981 didn’t ship with any software at all. On its own, it didn’t do anything. You had to program it yourself.

He had no interest in doing that. So he dropped it by our place instead.

“Your kid’s into this computer stuff, isn’t he?” he asked my dad, an Export A cigarette dangling out the corner of his mouth.

Oh yes I was.

I was crazy into computers.

The noble VIC-20, via Wikimedia

I’d spent the last year teaching myself a bit of BASIC programming, cadging a few minutes here and there on my middle school’s two Commodore PET computers. Every time I typed “RUN” — and watched a powerful machine execute my commands precisely — it sent a shiver of promethean voltage down into my soul. I was…