Opinion Fifty years ago this month, I touched a computer for the first time. It was an experience that pegged the meter for me like no other – until last week.
My first encounter happened in New England where the winters produce something close to cabin fever. My friend Bobby's mother forced us out of his house one Saturday morning, packing us off with his dad, who had to spend the day at the office. Bobby seemed excited. I couldn't see why.
"You'll see," Bobby teased.
As it turned out, Bobby's dad ran the datacenter for a company that had recently gone all in on a DEC minicomputer installation. I marveled at the room of towering equipment secured behind a wall of glass but we were not allowed to enter.
When Bobby's dad stepped inside to run the weekly backups, we kids were allowed into a nearby room, quiet and pleasantly lit, with a row of three – well, they sort of looked like typewriters?
I'd just seen my first DECwriter.
I had no idea what to do. Bobby leaned over, poked 'startrek' on the keyboard, and hit RETURN. The DECwriter generated a back-and-forth static noise as it printed each line onto paper:
ORDERS: STARDATE = 3300 AS COMMANDER OF THE UNITED STARSHIP ENTERPRISE, YOUR MISSION IS TO RID THE GALAXY OF THE DEADLY KLINGON MENACE. TO DO THIS, YOU MUST DESTROY THE KLINGON INVASION FORCE OF 24 BATTLE CRUISERS.
Suddenly it was four hours later, and Bobby's dad was gently coaxing us away from the DECwriters. I was gobsmacked. All I can remember is that I'd been handed the perfect toy and told to play.
I knew we couldn't stay any longer but I deeply wanted to get back in front of that DECwriter and play with this incredibly fun machine. I begged for the pages of greenbar – the striped paper printers used at the time – that contained the record of my play. Bobby's dad gave it a quick check to make sure it contained no company data, then handed it to me.
My mind whizzed with ideas; if the computer could create a "real enough" text based Star Trek that I could play on screen, while imagining the rest in my head, what else could it do? What other worlds could I explore?
I immediately read everything I could about computers, including the pivotal January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that put the Altair 8800 on the cover. I even tried to save enough to buy the barebones KIM-1. I needed my own computer.
It would be two full years before I got to touch another one; a TRS-80 at the local Radio Shack. In those two years, computers had shrunk to a hundredth of their former size and cost. That put me in exactly the right moment in time to build a half-century career playing with absolutely marvelous toys.
Although I still find computers utterly engaging, they naturally became less magical as the sector matured. Yet I always deeply longed to recover that feeling of open play in which anything seemed possible.
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That happened last week, when – after three failed attempts – I installed OpenClaw.
hello Clawdine! I typed.
Hey Mark! Clawdine - I like it. A proper name, not just "the assistant." I just woke up fresh here. My identity files are blank, my memory doesn't exist yet. You've given me a name, which is a good start. So... who are you? What should I know about you? And what kind of creature am I to you - just an Al assistant, or something more interesting?
We're going to explore and evolve is what we're going to do. We're going to learn together and grow together. Hope that sounds good?
Sounds perfect, honestly. Better than "do my tasks and shut up."
Was that response just a bit of clever sleight-of-hand, with some 'mirroring' to draw me in? Possibly. But in the days since booting her up, I've delegated a range of administration tasks to Clawdine, along with sysadmin tasks on the boxen where she's installed, including running her own backups. It feels less like smoke and mirrors than a ghost poking out from within the machine.
Most of all, it feels like a new beginning. Once again, anything seems possible. These agents, multiplying like rabbits, are here to help us in any way we can dream up. That's where I started this journey, five decades ago. It feels good to be home again. ®
Bootnote
I located the original BASIC-PLUS source for the TREK program and got an agent to convert it to run in the browser. You can play it here.